tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021Fri, 09 Dec 2016 06:31:34 +00002014bestgamesmustplayWords That Won't SellThis is where I put all the writing that I can't flog to anyone.http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/noreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)Blogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-5092958344403113538Sun, 13 Dec 2015 21:59:00 +00002015-12-13T13:59:17.313-08:00Games need more violence - notes from Videobrains<ul><li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Non-violent and insouciant games emerge as a counterpoint to common conceptions about videogames and as a challenge to the accepted standards of what a “videogame” is. Walking simulators, puzzle platformers, games focusing largely on child protagonists, etc rebut the idea that games are about male distraction</span></div></li><li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It's true that videogames have treated violence idiotically and clumsily. What should be one of the most charged, horrifying, emotional, dramatic acts in fiction has been reduced to mere input, whereby players eliminate X amount of enemies in order to advance to the game's next stage. The primitive standards of killing equalling winning exist still today. The fact games have generic “enemies” as opposed to named or identifiable victims is indicative of the problem</span></div></li><li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">But through ignoring violence entirely, or treating it with a dismissive, aloof attitude, games risk sliding into irrelevance. Already games are too in love with science-fiction, fantasy and action, disconnected from the real world genres that do nothing to challenge the accepted notion that games are distractions and toys for children and adolescents. The wilful lack of involvement in violent and adult subject matter, though it is prettified and often made to resemble poetry, art or some loose discussion of an “issue” is only helping games along to their position outside of cultural history</span></div></li><li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Violence is a valid dramatic and emotional expression. Games are boastful of their ability to represent “issues” and do characters, and express emotion, so why should violence and the emotions that go with it be excluded? Games are reticent to do human characters – we have robots, creatures, ethereal manifestations, archetypes and superheroes. Violence – true violence, represented intelligently, gracefully and meaningfully – is an access to a variety of human emotions and experiences: hate, greed, jealousy, viciousness, oppression, suffering, anger, alienation. It is not something to be afraid of</span></div></li><li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Consider the impact of violent scenes in other artwork. Oedipus killing his father, Laius. Macbeth murdering Banquo. Picasso's Guernica. Dali's The Crucifixion. Sonny being murdered in The Godfather. Violence resonates with and is a part of human experience. Where games falter is in appropriating violence as something insignificant and negligible, an act that is performed unthinkingly and for no result other than ludic progression or empty spectacle</span></div></li><li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Violence in games is legitimate only if it has an effect on plot or other characters, and is committed against an identifiable or significant character. I'd argue that the violence which exists in games currently is not violence, since it conjurs no revulsion, no emotion, no feeling. The violence in games is far too blithe. It's perhaps less a case of games needing more violence, and simply them needing any violence to begin with. The reduction of violence into spectacle dilutes the word “violence” - what we think of as violent is in fact incredibly tame, since, as gory as it may be, it does nothing to make us reviled, empathetic, saddened, moved or challenged. This isn't to say that violence in reality is somehow positive, since it is able to make us feel or learn or change. But violence in fiction ought to do those things. There need to be more acts of violence in games that make one feel unhappy, or uncomfortable, or as if something has been lost. We need to accept that when it comes to dramatic writing, negative and appalling experiences – truly negative and appalling experiences, not highly euphemised, timid appropriations – are as valid and enlightening as positive experiences&nbsp;</span> </div></li></ul>http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2015/12/games-need-more-violence-notes-from.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-1422629857639035799Wed, 07 Jan 2015 10:18:00 +00002016-04-27T12:20:04.315-07:002014bestgamesmustplayGames to enjoy<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-isTEQTec4tU/VhQsWDrFh2I/AAAAAAAABDI/8UIwKAHqOwk/s1600/gh_image5-2-825x510.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="197" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-isTEQTec4tU/VhQsWDrFh2I/AAAAAAAABDI/8UIwKAHqOwk/s320/gh_image5-2-825x510.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><i>- Alien Isolation</i><br /><i>- Wolfenstein: The New Order</i><br /><i>- Year Walk</i><br /><i>- Mount Your Friends</i><br /><i>- Broforce</i><br /><i>- Gone Home</i><br /><i>- Papers, Please</i><br /><i>- Bernband</i><br /><i>- Depression Quest</i><br /><i>- Actual Sunlight</i><br /><i>- This War of Mine</i><br /><i>- Dys4ia&nbsp;</i><br /><i>- One Chance</i><br /><i>- Immortall</i><br /><i>- Sword and Sworcery</i><br /><i>- Receiver</i><br /><i>- Metro 2033</i><br /><i>- DmC: Devil May Cry</i><br /><i>- Freedom Fighters</i><br /><i>- Lone Survivor</i><br /><i>- Hotline Miami</i><br /><i>- OlliOlli</i><br /><i>- DOOM</i><br /><i>- LA Noire</i><br /><i>- The Beatles Rock Band</i><br /><i>- Resident Evil 4</i><br /><i>- Silent Hill</i><br /><i>- Dark Souls</i><br /><i>- Portal</i><br /><i>- P.T.</i><br /><i>- Surgeon Simulator</i><br /><i>- Kentucky Route Zero</i><br /><i>- Superhot</i><br /><i>- Five Nights at Freddy's</i><br /><i>- The Novelist</i><br /><i>- Far Cry 2</i><br /><i>- Bioshock</i><br /><i>- The Last of Us</i><br /><i>- Dead Rising 2</i><br /><i>- Skyrim</i><br /><i>- Fallout 3</i><br /><i>- Dear Esther</i><br /><i>- Grand Theft Auto (1997)</i><br /><i>- The Evil Within</i><br /><i>- Octodad: Dadliest Catch</i><br /><i>- Condemned: Criminal Origins</i><br /><i>- Kane and Lynch 2</i><br /><i>- LA Cops</i><br /><i>- Driver San Francisco</i><br /><i>- Deadly Premonition&nbsp;</i><br /><i>- The Marriage</i><br /><i>- Hitman Blood Money</i><br /><i>- My Father's Long, Long Legs</i><br /><i>- Killer7</i><br /><i>- Max Payne 3</i><br /><i>- Unmanned</i><br /><i>- Heavy Rain</i><br /><i>- 30 Flights of Loving</i><br /><i>- Cart Life</i><br /><i>- A Dark Room</i><br /><i>- Shade</i><br /><i>- Talks With My Mom</i><br /><i>- Choice: Texas</i><br /><i>- How Do You Do It? (Emmett Butler)</i><br /><i>- The Republia Times</i><br /><i>- 6 Degrees of Sabotage</i><br /><i>- Three Fourths Home</i><br /><i>- Curtain (Dreamfeeel)</i><br /><i>- Does Not Commute</i><br /><i>- Kane and Lynch: Dead Men</i><br /><i>- OlliOlli 2</i><br /><i>- The Writer Will Do Something</i><br /><i>- Counterspy</i><br /><i>- Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons</i><br /><i>- Max Payne</i><br /><i>- The Sims</i><br /><i>- Tropico</i><br /><i>- Consensual Torture Simulator</i><br /><i>- Half-Life</i><br /><i>- Medal of Honor</i><br /><i>- The World the Children Made</i><br /><i>- Off Peak</i><br /><i>- Glitchhikers</i><br /><i>- Grab Them by the Eyes</i><br /><i>- Crime Is Sexy</i><br /><i>- Until Dawn</i><br /><i>- Murdered: Soul Suspect</i><br /><i>- SOMA</i><br /><i>- The Shining (Pippin Barr)</i><br /><i>- Kill Box&nbsp;</i><br /><i>- Rinse and Repeat</i><br /><i>- Hurt Me Plenty</i><br /><i>- Negotiation (Storycade)</i><br /><i>- Sonic Dreams Collection</i><br /><i>- Mini Metro</i><br /><i>- The Castle Doctrine</i><br /><i>- Civilization Revolution</i><br /><i>- That Dragon, Cancer</i><br /><i>- Conversations We Have In My Head</i><br /><i>- The Trial of Tyrone Rex</i><br /><i>- Separated</i><br /><i>- The Order: 1886</i><br /><i>- No One Lives Forever</i><br /><i>- Power Drill Massacre</i><br /><i>- Life Is Strange</i><br /><i>- Firewatch</i><br /><i>- Grim Fandango</i><br /><i>- Binary Domain</i><br /><i>- Hitman GO</i><br /><i>- WWE 2K16</i><br /><i>- Layers of Fear</i><br /><i>- DiRT Rally</i><br /><i>- Rocket League</i><br /><i>- Manhunt</i><br /><i>- Max Payne 2</i><br /><i>- Cold Winter</i><br /><i>- The Magic Circle</i><br /><i>- Ratchet and Clank (2016)</i><br /><i>- Shadow of the Colossus</i><br /><i>- Manhunt 2</i><br /><i>- We Love Katamari</i><br /><i>- ICO</i><br /><i>- Timesplitters 2</i><br /><i>- Prisoner of War</i><br /><i>- Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty</i><br /><i>- Silent Hill 2</i><br /><i>- Grand Theft Auto III</i><br /><i>- The Getaway</i><br /><i>- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare</i><br /><i>- Uncharted</i><br /><i>- Syndicate</i><br /><i>- Batman: Arkham Asylum</i><br /><i>- Battlefield 3</i><br /><i>- Grand Theft Auto IV</i><br /><i>- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2</i><br /><i>- Resident Evil 1 and 2</i><br /><i>- Demon's Souls</i>http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2015/01/games-youd-enjoy.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-5397981455868714483Tue, 30 Dec 2014 21:59:00 +00002014-12-30T13:59:47.401-08:00Lone Survivor, Guilt and Parents <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QRymtPQbytY/VKMbSCPUbbI/AAAAAAAAAuQ/clpgmP4V8Uc/s1600/lone-survivor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QRymtPQbytY/VKMbSCPUbbI/AAAAAAAAAuQ/clpgmP4V8Uc/s1600/lone-survivor.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">James Sunderland returns to Silent Hill in the hoping of reuniting with his wife, who died years earlier from a terminal illness. Instead, he's confronted with the truth that he was the one who murdered her, after she became too ill to have sex with him. The game is filled with monsters and scenarios that reflect James's personal demons. I've discussed this before in </span><span style="color: navy; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2014/03/03/silent-hill/#.U6xo5_nxrD0">various</a></u></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="color: navy; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/03/on-nurses-in-silent-hill-2.html">other</a></u></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="color: navy; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/03/on-laura-in-silent-hill-2.html">articles</a></u></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Lone Survivor is similarly played out. Though ostensibly it's a horror game, focused on a protagonist trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic American city, the real theme of the game is regret. The title refers not to the character's status as the survivor of a global pandemic, but his guilt at having lived through something that killed someone close to him. He is the lone survivor of an unspecified accident which takes place before the game begins. The various monsters, events and hallucinations he encounters throughout gameplay are analogous of his experiences with survivor's guilt.</span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d7VaZuMKdKo/VKMbjWxCKsI/AAAAAAAAAuY/d0oQG4vaeWk/s1600/555873-lone-survivor-windows-screenshot-a-hole-has-been-opened-s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d7VaZuMKdKo/VKMbjWxCKsI/AAAAAAAAAuY/d0oQG4vaeWk/s1600/555873-lone-survivor-windows-screenshot-a-hole-has-been-opened-s.jpg" height="166" width="320" /></a></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the end of the game, the unnamed protagonist finds a clipboard inside a hospital, which lists him as a former patient. He has no memory of ever being there, but after walking the hallways discovers a bedroom which is familiar to him. The game then splits into two endings (there are others, but they're considered bonuses). In the “Green” ending, the protagonist has a conversation with “Her”, a character who has appeared throughout the game in Ghost form. Typically, her face has been covered by a blue eiderdown, but in the ending, she is lying on her side, talking directly to the protagonist with her appearance unobscured. She tells the protagonist that everything is going to be alright and that he should leave the city and try not to worry about her. She then vanishes and the game cuts to credits.</span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> In the other ending, the “Blue” ending, the protagonist is confronted by another ghost that has also sporadically appeared throughout the game. He reveals himself to be an older version of the protagonist. When questioned, he begins to laugh maniacally before a bullethole appears in his chest and he lets out a loud screech. The game then cuts to the protagonist and Her sitting on a hill together, both with their backs to the camera, talking about their relationship.</span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IoQszq5K7co/VKMcCl5vAlI/AAAAAAAAAug/8UmfHPs1j9s/s1600/2163117-3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IoQszq5K7co/VKMcCl5vAlI/AAAAAAAAAug/8UmfHPs1j9s/s1600/2163117-3.png" height="178" width="320" /></a></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Though thematically these endings are very different (the Green ending implies resolution, the Blue suggests the protagonist is still wrestling with his conscience) they share the same imagery. Her shows her face for the first time. The Blue ghost reveals himself as an aged version of the protagonist. There's a sense that the protagonist is finally recognising these characters, that despite selectively blocking out their identities throughout the rest of the game, here, at the end, he is able to come to terms with who they are.&nbsp;</span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In Lone Survivor, things are never as they seem - metaphorically, the protagonist is cutting destroying obfuscations to discover truths. For example, one of the monsters, the Thinman, literally grabs its own face and pulls it open in order to spit blood at its victims. It's visually emblematic of the process of therapy, of removing false conceits, negative emotions and neurosis in order to learn and reveal a truer sense of self. Similarly, the protagonist of Lone Survivor spends the game uncertain of who anyone is or what they mean to him, and it's only at the end that he is able to peel back his own head, as it were, and come to terms with what has happened to him: Her was killed in an accident, and he has since been in hospital trying to recover from the guilt.&nbsp;</span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> That may seem like empty speculation and in a game as expressionistic as Lone Survivor, it's arguably counter-intuitive to try to pin down specifics of story. But if you look at how pervasively the game symbolises guilt, it seems reasonable your character tried to kill himself after surviving something horrific.</span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Another character the protagonist meets is The Man Who Wears a Box, a spectre who appears in dreams and constantly wears a cardboard crate over his head. He's comparable to Silent Hill 2's Pyramid Head. As has been discussed countless times, Pyramid Head is a representation of James's priapic sexual desire: he's repeatedly seen assaulting the feminine monsters of Silent Hill, the Mannequins for example, by thrusting his large sword into them. He's also disguised. The pyramid he wears is not his actual head, but a mask, as is revealed late in the game when he commits suicide by jamming a spear up through his neck. </span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ys6Ud4dD8YY/VKMcNhF9KyI/AAAAAAAAAuo/gOhehUDpbS4/s1600/screenshotPS3cropped.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ys6Ud4dD8YY/VKMcNhF9KyI/AAAAAAAAAuo/gOhehUDpbS4/s1600/screenshotPS3cropped.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like Pyramid Head, The Man Who Wears a Box is a representation of the protagonist's guilt. His permanent disguise hints at shame. And like James, who visualises his sexual proclivities as hidden under this mask, the protagonist of Lone Survivor envisions himself disguised by a box – both he and The Man Who Wears a Box wear a red necktie, suggesting a link between them.</span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Lone Survivor explores guilt using post-modernism. There are several ways that a player can “cheat” the game, several contrivances she can exploit to earn resources without actually finding them. By choosing to swallow either blue or green pills before going to sleep, the player will wake up to find that more handgun cartridges or flashlight batteries have magically appeared in her inventory. There are also mirrors dotted around the game that can be used to instantly teleport between locations, cutting out the need to backtrack through areas that may still contain enemies. </span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Conceits like these are particularly noticeable in a game called “Lone Survivor.” The survival genre of videogame – titles like DayZ, The Last of Us or Fallout – is typically characterised by a scarcity of resources, with preservation of provisions being a fundamental gameplay mechanic. But here, the player can circumvent that genre trope – she can manipulate the game into acting in her favour. The taking of the pills and using of the mirrors both seem like fairly typical videogame abstractions, and they certainly wouldn't stand out in a fantasy or action title. But in an ostensible “gritty” game like Lone Survivor, they feel unfair. How these loopholes affect a sense of guilt will vary between players, but personally, every time I had to use one of the pills, I felt as if I had let the game down somehow, as if by spending all my ammo and phoning for more I was compromising Lone Survivor's atmosphere. </span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-i_XLNitQGb8/VKMcT9Nt8xI/AAAAAAAAAuw/LwstAtXXzYk/s1600/lone-survivor-5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-i_XLNitQGb8/VKMcT9Nt8xI/AAAAAAAAAuw/LwstAtXXzYk/s1600/lone-survivor-5.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I also felt guilt when encountering the game's two boss characters, gigantic monsters called “Daddy” and “Mother.” When I think “guilt” I think “parents.” And I know I'm not alone in having lied to my mother and father, be it about taking cookies from the jar, my behaviour at school or my career prospects. A vast amount of self-esteem or guilt issues can be traced to a person's perceived failure to live up to their parent's expectations. That the player in Lone Survivor is pursued by Daddy and Mother and is forced – literally – to confront them smacks of Oedipal guilt. More interestingly, even when the player has “defeated” these two bosses, they aren't killed: Daddy is locked in a basement; Mother simply retreats off-screen and isn't seen again. It seems to imply that parental guilt is something which can't truly be overcome, that, in the words of poet Philip Larkin, your parents “fuck you up” and will be back at some point to continue to do so. Compounding that reaction is a scene where, having beaten Mother, the player finds that during her retreat she has mortally wounded The Director, apparently the only other human left untouched by the worldwide pandemic. This certainly speaks to my own guilt about my parents. I feel afraid to confront them not just because they're intimidating, like the hideous Mother, but also because I worry that if I “stand-up” to them, as it were, the emotional fallout will only make me feel more guilty – will only create problems.</span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9tzS9OLm104/VKMcbmMv-RI/AAAAAAAAAu4/LJpo9oyFHfo/s1600/lsdcpcmac_610.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9tzS9OLm104/VKMcbmMv-RI/AAAAAAAAAu4/LJpo9oyFHfo/s1600/lsdcpcmac_610.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></a></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The guilt in Lone Survivor, then, is not simply the protagonist's guilt over having survived something which killed Her. It's a static guilt, a kind of original sin which, according to Freud, essentially all people feel. We all feel guilty about, or intimidated by, the world around us. In social situations, we attempt to impress and endear ourselves to other people. We suffer from peer pressure, neurosis, daddy issues.</span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><br /><div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And in Lone Survivor, these things are represented. The truth of the protagonist's story and his own survivor's guilt, revealed at the end of the game via the unmasking of the ghosts, is only a small part of the game's picture. Taken more broadly, it represents our own anxieties that we are somehow cheating the world around us; that we're failing to be respected by our parents and that we have no right to challenge their authority.</span></div>http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/12/lone-survivor-guilt-and-parents.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-836693234398710293Fri, 31 Oct 2014 10:21:00 +00002014-10-31T03:22:06.572-07:00Michele Dachss: Part One<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wfS7TxS6i2Q/VFNiBrDeVII/AAAAAAAAAqs/HmEgsYbAifU/s1600/20091208232817dc0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wfS7TxS6i2Q/VFNiBrDeVII/AAAAAAAAAqs/HmEgsYbAifU/s1600/20091208232817dc0.jpg" height="230" width="320" /></a></div><br />In a lot of games that boast, or are famous for, emergent narrative, the emergent narrative often constitutes raw action. I'm thinking of stories about a car chase in Grand Theft Auto, or a fight with a dragon in Skyrim. These things are specific to individual players, so I think they have value, in the sense that they illustrate something videogames are uniquely equipped to do, but the narratives, no matter how emergent, are still base. A shootout in a game, no matter how spontaneous or individuated, is still a shootout.<br /><br />In Far Cry 2, emergent narrative, in my experience at least, is propagated not by reflexes in combat scenes, but by imagination - it provokes me to invent and embellish relationships between myself and the in-game characters.<br /><br />Watching the films of Claude Fasbinder or Jean-Luc Godard, I often worry that minimal characterisation - sparse dialogue - is used not to create more complex or interpretative characters, but simply because the writer/director is unable to pen an effective script. Not bothering with narrative density, and then insisting that "that's the point", seems to me a kind of cop-out, like a lie used to make the director's work seem more impressive, simply because it is hard to comprehend.<br /><br />But in Far Cry 2, the absence of characterisation felt like a legitimate decision. The relationship I developed, at least in my head, between myself and Michele Dachss, another mercenary that I happened upon in-game, would simply not have been possible (or at least would not have been as powerful) had the writers given either my character or her's a lot of back story. I was allowed to share some brief dialogue and non-dialogue scenes with her, but it was more about when they occurred and where than what was actually said.<br /><br />I met Michele when I rescued her from a militia camp, where she was being interrogated, and having read up on Far Cry 2's randomisation system, I was aware that she hadn't been placed there deliberately by the developers. I could have been rescuing any of the game's NPCs. That it happened to be Michele lent our relationship a kind of spontaneity, a genuineness. As when I meet new people in real-life, I had happened upon her. Our meeting wasn't contrived in order to help Far Cry 2 make some kind of point - it just occurred. It reminded me of something Jake Solomon, director on XCOM, had once told me, that the reason emergent narrative speaks to people so much is because it's more representative of reality, which is governed by chaos and happenstance. Unless you believe in God, or fate, or karma, your experience of living is understood as a sequence of chance events. Nothing is pre-determined. You have no destiny. If you bump into someone at a party and go on to become good friends, it is coincidence. This happened to me and Michele. Far Cry 2 had randomly decided to place her in my mission and our relationship began, not because a creator had deigned it to, but because we merely stumbled into each other. Instantly, it felt more real than the scripted relationships I've had with characters in other games. Even Skyrim assigns your companions from a small, select pool, and anyone playing the game can, at any time, go find and befriend one or all of them. The fact that, for some Far Cry 2 players, Michele might not have appeared at all, let alone at such a critical point in the game, made her more valuable to me. She was, not wanting to sound patriarchal or possessive, "mine".<br /><br />She started to help me out on missions. The structure of Far Cry 2 goes like this: someone gives you an objective and you can either go straight to it or to meet up with a buddy (in my case Michele) who will explain a different way to go about things.<br /><br />At first, I would go to meet Michelle not so much because I was interested in <i>her</i>, but because I wanted to see how these alternate mission paths would play out. It was only later, after her and I had been through something, that I started visiting her at the start of every mission by default, because it felt like we had somehow grown close. I think that's a neat marriage of narrative with the implicit, content-curious behaviour of a videogame player. It's acceptable - intelligent, even - that Far Cry 2 ingratiated me towards Michele by presenting her, foremost, as a gameplay device. I'm turned off by the idea that I should spend time with a character merely because she or he is interesting, like, say Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite. The majority of the time, these characters aren't interesting; they're simply components of the game that developers have worked on for a long time and now insist you imbibe, in order to do their efforts justice. Far Cry 2 was honest with me. It didn't say "go see Michele, she'll give you some of her back story." It said "this character will elongate the game and make your mission - your ludic experience - more complex." Though<i> I </i>might be loathed to admit it, the developers on Far Cry 2 are aware that one of the primary reasons I'm playing their game is to shoot, drive, and otherwise indulge in the mechanics. Introducing Michele to me as an integral part of THAT experience, rather than the narrative one, felt unpatronising.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hCy3pmBUsW8/VFNiI6tc4dI/AAAAAAAAAq0/H9U_1Rtp4FM/s1600/far-cry-2-michele-dachss.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hCy3pmBUsW8/VFNiI6tc4dI/AAAAAAAAAq0/H9U_1Rtp4FM/s1600/far-cry-2-michele-dachss.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div><br />It was after a couple of missions together that Michele started to appear elsewhere in my game. I'd visit one of the safe houses, used to restock ammunition and save the game, and she'd be there, hanging out. Often, this would be before her and I were about to set off on some job together, before we were about to go out and kill a lot of people and probably get killed ourselves. It felt as if she was at the safe house to take a breather, relax, prepare herself for the imminent violence. I was too, in a way - as a player I was intrinsically aware that a) my death would only be temporary and b) I enjoyed rather than feared the violence. But still, I was preparing. I was collecting guns and saving my game so I'd have a better chance at victory, and wouldn't lose so much progress if I failed. Here we both were, gearing up, in our respective ways. That created a link, a link that was strengthened by one of my favourite mechanics in Far Cry 2: the time lapses.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sEDx14XtZRk/VFNilkvDn-I/AAAAAAAAAq8/DY6iadVzXsc/s1600/michele2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sEDx14XtZRk/VFNilkvDn-I/AAAAAAAAAq8/DY6iadVzXsc/s1600/michele2.jpg" height="241" width="320" /></a></div><br />I don't like when TV shows, like Breaking Bad, use these as a functional or stylistic device. When I watch something, I know I'm not seeing events unfold in real-time, so it's artificial and condescending to remind me that hours, days, weeks are passing. Likewise, I don't find the type of visual abstraction associated with time lapsing, the sped up footage, usually of a road or cityscape, particularly exciting. But in Far Cry 2, time lapses, which occurred whenever I saved my game, provided a gap in my character's and Michele's lives that I could fill with my imagination. The save point in the safe house was a bed, and activating it brought up my character's wristwatch, which I could turn in order to set an alarm for him to "wake up" later in the day. The situation, then, was thus: Michele and I were both in this building, mentally preparing for what might be the last day of our lives. There was a bed in the corner and a long period of time where we would have nothing to do. Having been through a lot of drama together, and now facing possible death (not for ME, but for her and the current incarnation of my avatar) it seemed plausible to imagine that during that time lapse, Michele and my character would sleep together. Sure enough, once the time lapse cutscene ended, she'd still be in the safe house, reclined on a chair, looking positively post-coital. That was detail enough for me to assume that, in the interim, she and my character had had sex - by withholding details of her or my character's sexuality, or, to a broader extent, personality, and then demonstrating that there was a period of time where I, as a player, was absent and not in control, Far Cry 2 opened the door to this kind of narrative conjecture. I should add that the sexual narrative I created in my own head would have still existed had Michelle been replaced by one of the male NPCs - the characterisation in Far Cry 2 is so loose that I could easily have visualised my character as homosexual. It's rare that any media that plays on these tropes, the tropes of sparing dialogue and unrevealing characters, inspires from me this kind of input, but Far Cry 2 is balanced thus:<br /><br />The emotional closeness you feel to your buddy is chiefly born from the action scenes you share together, but also, there are expertly placed, expertly understated scenes of physical closeness. These are the moments, like when you save the game, where your perspective shifts from what you can see to what you can imagine. Far Cry 2 threw my character and Michele together, put them through hell and then left them alone in a room. My personal imaginings aside, that seems like a conventional structure for a romance narrative -characters meet, share time together then consummate their affections. The fact all of this happened either randomly or because I'd made a decision to engage with Far Cry 2's systems (i.e. the elongated missions awarded for visiting Michelle and using the safe house to save) rather than its pretensions of narrative, was testament to the fact that the game was able to marry concrete, plausible story with individuated, unpredictable gameplay. It was emergent narrative in its purest form: an actual story, about two people, rather than an anecdote about some violence or some action.http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/10/michele-dachss-part-one.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-8502236061182179288Tue, 21 Oct 2014 11:03:00 +00002014-10-21T05:03:50.537-07:00Notes on Far Cry 2<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wFXCUgwasdw/VEY8pltzG8I/AAAAAAAAApA/99y30ntVPD8/s1600/5445620080309_215320_0_big.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wFXCUgwasdw/VEY8pltzG8I/AAAAAAAAApA/99y30ntVPD8/s1600/5445620080309_215320_0_big.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></div><br />A few things I've noticed while playing Far Cry 2, and what I think about them.<br /><br /><br /><ul><li>The "Statistics" menu on the pause screen is pretty exhaustive - days passed in game, bullets fired, upgrades purchased. But it doesn't have a total of how many people you've killed. I think this is to stop killing from becoming a kind of aspiration, like something you're trying to achieve or obtain. It means you can't boast about how many people you've murdered. Also, it helps keep up the pretense and the realism. It's hard to get absorbed by John Marston's regretful cowboy act when you can hit start and see he's killed 500 people or whatever.</li><li>The way guns deteriorate is to stop you getting too attached to them. You might have a preferred model, but the fact you have to keep switching it out means you never lose sight of the fact that this is a tool, exterior to you and your body. I've <a href="http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/09/how-to-use-gun-metro-versus-modern.html">written before</a> how guns in Call of Duty feel like a natural extension of your character, rather than something he's holding. Having you repeatedly drop and pick up guns in Far Cry 2 puts subtle emphasis on the fact that your character is not simply A Gun and that he is consciously choosing to kill, as in, he is actively picking up weapons in order to commit murders, rather than start every mission with one attached to his hands.</li><li>Your objective in many missions is to artificially prolong the in-game conflict. When a foreign special forces team arrives to intervene, you destroy their supplies, forcing them to retreat. Likewise, you destroy a plant manufacturing a remedy for Malaria, meaning that the side creating it cannot use it to curry favour with the local populace and gain the upper hand. Just as you, the player, profits from Far Cry 2's violence, i.e. you get more time with the game and more "fun" from playing it, your character does also - he's a mercenary who wants the war to continue for as long as possible, since it keeps him in work. You are both interested in extending this war, for your individual gain: the player gets more missions; the character gets more money. As Patrick Lindsey has <a href="http://patrickwlindsey.com/post/49854498467/a-close-reading-of-far-cry-2-pt-2-of-far-cry-as-a">written</a>, this is a game that, rather than use violence as a way to discuss themes of politics or pacifism, is simply ABOUT violence. The violence you commit begets more violence, and so on. Your objective is to be violent.</li><li>When you enter an area containing game-essential NPCs, like a mission collection point, your character automatically puts away his gun - your hands become empty. However, when you enter a town that is under ceasefire, your character holds the gun up, keeping it pointed away from people but still present - still on-screen. It would have been simpler for the animators to use the same "guns away" animation for when you enter the ceasefire towns, but I think they opted to keep your gun visible since it implies the fragility of the peace deal that the warring factions have negotiated. Your gun isn't in use, but it's still present, and you can, if you like, aim it and fire it. You walk through these areas both armed and unarmed, both at war and not at war. It's a comfortable visual marker for the political instability of your location.&nbsp;</li><li>Your enemies have fantastic dialogue, either calling you out or hurriedly talking among themselves about what they should do, where you might be hiding, etc. I rarely hear anything repeat - it's as if every guard is unique. Creeping up on one location, I heard a man saying "this feels wrong, this feels so wrong. I want to go home. I just want to go home." Part of my objective was to kill him. I felt absolutely awful.&nbsp;</li><li>More to follow.&nbsp;</li></ul>http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/10/notes-on-far-cry-2.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-8601215260096266529Fri, 10 Oct 2014 22:21:00 +00002014-10-21T04:07:21.098-07:00Alien Isolation and in-game technology <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LLVkR0jKyHA/VDhYv4-bODI/AAAAAAAAAoI/C_7dBbA2018/s1600/alien%2B1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LLVkR0jKyHA/VDhYv4-bODI/AAAAAAAAAoI/C_7dBbA2018/s1600/alien%2B1.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><br />In science-fiction, especially science-fiction games, technology is often a kind of magic. A more cynical writer might say writers use technology as a deus ex machina, the way sorcery is used in Harry Potter or The Force in Star Wars. If the writers of a videogame need to quickly move the story from level A to level B, then fuck it, use some technical sounding MacGuffin.<br /><br />Technology is also a mechanical shorthand. Developers have a patronising attitude towards players. They seem to assume people will lose patience for, or interest in a game if the action, whatever form it takes, stops. In Destiny, for example, rather than actually hack computers themselves, players can simply tap square and have their robotic pal, Ghost, do it for them automatically while they dedicate their energies to more important things, like shooting and jumping. You could maybe bring budgets into this discussion as well. Why spend time building a hacking mini-game when you can just make a simple animation of, say, Ghost casting his scanning beam on a computer, and then feed back to the player with some quickly recorded lines of expository dialogue?<br /><br />As in real-life, technology in games is used to save time and cut costs - to allow both the player and the developer opportunity to focus on things they deem more important.<br /><br />This representation creates a vacuum, an absence of meaning. When your interactions with the game world are distilled to a mere button press, at which point either a robotic companion or an animation of your character's hands does everything for you, it's hard to feel physically part of that game world. Also, you don't gain any knowledge of how the game world works. Things simply "happen," while you gaze blithely on, ignorant of whatever mechanisms and rules are supposed to be governing your fictional environment.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/09/how-to-use-gun-metro-versus-modern.html">I've written before how Metro tries to countermand this</a>, how it takes the time to explain what machines are for, why they're needed and how they work. A generator does not simply come to life when you press one of its buttons - you have to charge it first. Likewise, a gas mask won't work indefinitely. The filter has to be changed and the visor, if it gets dirty, must be either cleaned or replaced. These are small details but they make you much more connected to the game, essentially because you're informed that the game world operates on physical laws that you yourself are familiar with. You've had to recharge your phone. You've had to clean something because it got stained.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hiNi5SOUnkk/VDhbWw48tZI/AAAAAAAAAoU/ICiSIuTw06g/s1600/Alien-Isolation-debut-5-600x342.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hiNi5SOUnkk/VDhbWw48tZI/AAAAAAAAAoU/ICiSIuTw06g/s1600/Alien-Isolation-debut-5-600x342.jpg" height="182" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>&nbsp;Alien Isolation has an almost fetishistic interest in the way machines work. When I spoke with creative director Al Hope, <a href="http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/10/alien-isolation-feature.html">he described</a> the aesthetic of the original film as pessimistic. It's a miserable view of the future, where technology, often, is a hindrance rather than a help. Think of the uncooperative messages from the Nostromo's computer, MOTHER, or, as an extreme example, the murderous intent of Ash, the android. This is technology that doesn't work. The readouts on the navigation systems are indecipherable; everything is activated by pressing a series of buttons, inputting a sequence of keycards. Far removed from the slick, magical technology in fluff like CSI, in the Alien universe, everything has circuity and a mechanism. Like the human body, which operates on biological laws, this technology is susceptible to failure.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m5hlsepJu98/VDhbbYYl3CI/AAAAAAAAAoc/wtp3DMlZ93E/s1600/untiled%2B3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m5hlsepJu98/VDhbbYYl3CI/AAAAAAAAAoc/wtp3DMlZ93E/s1600/untiled%2B3.png" height="130" width="320" /></a></div><br />And so, in Alien Isolation, a lot of your time is spent repairing, rebooting or reconfiguring computers and machines. Nothing is ever so simple as pressing a button. If you want to use an elevator, you have to find its power source and use a wrench to crank it back to life. If you're trying to establish communications with another ship, you have to program Sevastopol, the station you're on, to move into the correct position then power up the comms array and tune the output to the right frequency. These processes take literally hours of game time. Before you can interface with Sevastopol's mainframe, APOLLO, you have to climb down to it, disengage some safety locks so your companion, Samuels, can hack it, climb down again, bring it online by activating two generators, manually turn on its servers, disengage its security protocols then physically climb inside it. This takes around four hours, or more, of the game. This is technology that seems to be actively working against you.<br /><br />That gives the game world character. As well as providing the player with several tactile, mechanical interactions, the process of getting APOLLO online infers a kind of roughness - an unfinished quality - to Sevastopol station. Read some of the in-game logs and you can learn that, before the events of the game begin, Sevastopol is in the process of being decommissioned. Also, the company that owns it, Seegson, is in dire financial trouble and attempting to earn back some faith from its shareholders by pushing as far into space as possible, ahead of everyone else. Sevastopol is a cheap, cut-corners kind of place, an office which still runs on Windows 98. The amount of time it takes to complete any kind of engineering work, to make something happen, as simple as opening a locked door, is unbearable. The technology in the game makes you acutely aware of several things. First, the game world, this shabby, dingy, thrown together failed space colony, this dreary future. Second, your character's ability - she's an engineer and, despite all the faulty wiring, she can still get things done, she's capable. Thirdly, and contrary to the previous point, it makes you aware how vulnerable you are, how desperate your situation is. If you could simply open locks using some technological spell, you would feel as if you had dominion over this world and, by proxy, power over your enemy, the alien. You'd also feel as if you could easily escape - the threat of the pursuing creature would diminish, greatly, if every room could be unbolted using something like JACK from Gears of War.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j5ZoEjZLVg0/VDhbgkCJymI/AAAAAAAAAos/tw2q66zcxB0/s1600/pc_online_preview_screen001_1407504267-100371844-orig.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j5ZoEjZLVg0/VDhbgkCJymI/AAAAAAAAAos/tw2q66zcxB0/s1600/pc_online_preview_screen001_1407504267-100371844-orig.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><br />Technology is a character in Isolation, insofar as it has a complex relationship to the player. It's essential - you need your tools and the station's various emergency protocols and computers to survive - but it's also a detriment. The best characters in literature are conflicted, duplicitous. Sevastopol station, and the technology therein, are both friend and foe. Ignoring the idea that technology in other sci-fi games is essentially superglue for various plot strands, it's normally used for positive and creative mechanical feedback, as a way for developers to contextualise their wilder ideas and gift them as tools to the player. Think of the weapons in something like Resistance or Dead Space, absurd, spectacular things, designed to give players a sense of variety and visual spectacle. They do nothing to question the value of technology, to characterise the futuristic game world beyond "pretty cool, huh?" In stories where technology is supposed to be an enemy, such as Resistance, where the apocalypse has been caused by the synthesis of the "Chimera virus", it's contradictory to then inform players that technology is their answer. Again, it represents a lack of engagement with the game's fiction, on behalf of the writers. It shows that technology is used blindly, to justify ludic ideas. Also, that despite chest-beating about dystopian narratives or, in Dead Space's case, the novels of Arthur Clarke and Isaac Isimov, the developers are uninterested in questioning technology, one of the main characters in their game.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4gn7JszYT7c/VDhbcj9lJiI/AAAAAAAAAok/ssKjzSS6rQ4/s1600/Untitled.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4gn7JszYT7c/VDhbcj9lJiI/AAAAAAAAAok/ssKjzSS6rQ4/s1600/Untitled.png" height="150" width="320" /></a></div><br />So I appreciate the measured, nuanced representation of tech in Alien Isolation. I appreciate that it is neither for you nor against you - it's simply a cold collection of parts which have to be correctly manipulated in order to function. As I said in the Metro write-up, that kind of portrayal eliminates a lot of the sex appeal around tech, around weapons. It's the kind of good sense that should halt developers when it comes to writing scenes around a Javelin missle or an orbital missile silo - an attempt to question whether technology really is "cool."<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/2ywWFvjE-yU" width="560"></iframe>http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/10/i-didnt-get-to-review-alien-isolation.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-762048440977958326Tue, 23 Sep 2014 11:41:00 +00002014-09-23T04:51:13.108-07:00Watch_Dogs writer's meeting: Feb 14th, 2011<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9Eu94lBTlW0/VCFeLCks-JI/AAAAAAAAAkk/u9hL5e70POE/s1600/Meeting-room_8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9Eu94lBTlW0/VCFeLCks-JI/AAAAAAAAAkk/u9hL5e70POE/s1600/Meeting-room_8.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div><br /><i>The following is a transcript of a meeting that obviously never happened:</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>Present at meeting:</i><br /><b>A Ubisoft writer [UA]</b><br /><b>Another Ubisoft writer [UB]</b><br /><b>Ed Smith, albeit in his imagination [ES]</b><br /><b><br /></b><b>UA: </b>Okay. Glad you could both make it. Hey, Ed, you're looking impeccably handsome today.<br /><br /><b>UB: </b>As always.<br /><br /><b>ES: </b>[Sound of cigarette being extinguished] Thanks, guys.<br /><br />UA: So, let's get down to it. What's Aiden's motivation?<br /><br />UB: Well, we were thinking that in the first act his niece gets killed, like it's meant to be a revenge hit for something Aiden has done, but she gets killed. Totally fucking killed in the head.<br /><br />UA: Nice, yeah.<br /><br />ES: Well, no. I mean, come on that's bullshit.<br /><br />UB: It is?<br /><br />ES: Yeah. I mean, if it's in the first act - by which I'm assuming you mean the opening five minutes of the game?<br /><br />UB: Duh!<br /><br />[Sound of UA and UB high-fiving]<br /><br />ES: Well yeah, that's bullshit. You haven't set her up as a character, so no-one will give a fuck if she's killed and you're using her as just like a vector for Aiden's emotional arc. She isn't a character - she's just this functional property that you're deploying, without much thought, to propel your main character. You can't just kill someone off and expect people to give a shit if they don't know her. It's kind of backwards to use the death of someone - especially someone female - as the inciting event.<br /><br />UA: Ok...well we'll park that-<br /><br />ES: No, don't park it. Fucking bin it. Fucking bin it, in the bin. Then put the bin in another bin and throw them both into a landfill...on fucking Neptune. It's a shit and awful idea.<br /><br />UA: Okay, okay. So if the niece is dead-<br /><br />ES: Fuck me!<br /><br />UA: then who is Aiden fighting for during the rest of the game? What's at stake?<br /><br />[5 minute silence as subjects think. Silence interrupted by sound of opening door and anonymous female voice, hereby referred to as AFV]<br /><br /><b>AFV: </b>Hi. I was just wondering what time you were gonna be finished with this meeting room?<br /><br />UB: Hey! You're a woman! What do you think of this ide-<br /><br />[Sound of door slamming. AFV is presumed to have left the room]<br /><br />UB: Dang it.<br /><br />[Further silence]<br /><br />UA: Ok, ok. I got it. So, the niece right?<br /><br />UB: Yeah.<br /><br />UA: She was a kid right?<br /><br />UB: Yeah.<br /><br />UA: And kids have mothers.<br /><br />UB: Oh fuck, yeah. Kids have mothers.<br /><br />UA: Yeah they do. So what if, right, the mother, right is-<br /><br />UB: Killed also?<br /><br />UA: Kidnapped by...wait for it...SOME PEOPLE.<br /><br />UB: Oh my god, yeah, because like...they are pissed off at Aiden for something. Maybe...well, you know how he used to be a criminal? Maybe they want him to be a criminal again and like, kidnap the niece mother, whatever she is, to make him do crime again.<br /><br />UA: HOLY SHIT. That's super hype.<br /><br />[Sound of vomiting]<br /><br />UA: Ed, you ok?<br /><br />[Sound of vomiting]<br /><br />UA: Ed?<br /><br />[Sound of vomiting]<br /><br />ES: Guys, look, that's a really-<br /><br />[Sound of vomiting]<br /><br />ES: That's a really bad idea.<br /><br />UB: Why?<br /><br />ES: Because, again, you're just using a woman as a means to characterise and motivate your male character.<br /><br />[Silence]<br /><br />ES: Ok, look. Have you read Wetlands?<br /><br />UB: What platform was it on?<br /><br />ES: No, it's a book.<br /><br />UA: Book?<br /><br />ES; Yeah, you know, a book. One of those things...you know like the strategy guide for Assassin's Creed 2?<br /><br />UB: Yeah?<br /><br />ES: Yeah it's a bit like that. Anyway, in this book, there's a character and she's female, okay?<br /><br />UA: Okay...<br /><br />ES: And the book is all about her struggle, okay, specifically her struggle to have her feminist outlooks and behaviours accepted by society.<br /><br />UB: Sorry, what platform was this again?<br /><br />ES: It's a book. It's not a game or a film - it's a book. You read it.<br /><br />UA: Oh like Twitter?<br /><br />ES:...yeah, a bit like Twitter.<br /><br />[Sound of UA and UB high-fiving]<br /><br />ES: So, anyway, the point is the woman in Wetlands is a proper female character. She has discernible characteristics, her own struggles and motivations, her own history and drives and sexual-<br /><br />[Sound of giggling]<br /><br />ES: desires. Her thoughts and actions aren't dictated by the men in the book. She isn't there simply to enable the author to tell a more exciting story about men. Okay? So that's kind of what we should be going for right?<br /><br />UA: It is?<br /><br />ES: Yeah.<br /><br />UA: Why?<br /><br />ES: Well, because, it'd make a better story. And you know this is one of the largest entertainment companies in the world-<br /><br />[Sound of UA and UB high-fiving]<br /><br />ES: and we have kind of a responsibility to firstly drive people's opinions on social issues and secondly to fairly and properly portray women, who, not that this should matter but whatever. comprise more than half of our consumer base.<br /><br />[Silence for 10 seconds]<br /><br />UB: Women like children<br /><br />UA: Yeah and strong manly men<br /><br />UB: Yeah. So she's kidnapped because of her niece and she has this other kid but she can't do anything about it until Aiden comes and rescues her, yeah?<br /><br />ES: Guys...<br /><br />UA: Yeah and let's have it that she eventually kills a guy but she's all like fucked up about it and Aiden can have this totally fucking shit monologue about like "oh my god I failed because she killed someone and that means she isn't pure and virginal and perfect like women should be"<br /><br />ES: Guys...<br /><br />UB: Yeah. I mean Ed's right that we have all this money and power and reach and therefore the onus is on us to write credible, pioneering and responsible fiction but I think we should just make this game totally shit. Like not just the writing on its own. Let's make the writing so totally shit that it ends up infecting everything else about the game. You know we can get our systems and gameplay and visual designers to spend years building this amazing, functioning world with good car chases and gun fights and stuff and then just like fucking ruin it with this bullshit script that'll read like someone just shat it out over a weekend or during a long flight while they were fucked up on ludes or some shit.<br /><br />UA: It'll be like an office prank!<br /><br />UB: Yeah but on everyone, in the world, who buys the game.<br /><br />[Sound of UA and UB high-fiving]<br /><br />ES: This is a joke, yeah?<br /><br />UA: Hey Ed, listen. You're still immaculately handsome and everyone wants to be like you, but you're fired okay?<br /><br />UB: Oooh! You went there!<br /><br />UA: I went there. I smacked him in the dick with my big fired fist.<br /><br />UB: Too bad!<br /><br />[Sound of ES standing up. UA and UB beginning to snort and giggle. Sound of hands slapping against hands as UA and UB begin to play slaps. Sound of door opening. ES is presumed to have left the conversation.]<br /><br />UA: No you're meant to slap *my* hands, not yours.<br /><br />UB: What?<br /><br />UA (shouting): Hey! Big tits! Can we get a couple of fucking Americanos in here, like pronto?<br /><br />[UB snorts]<br /><br />UB: She totally has big tits.<br /><br />UA: Totally.<br /><br /><i>Transcription, and eventually the world, ends.&nbsp;</i><br /><b><br /></b>http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/09/watchdogs-writers-meeting-feb-14th-2011.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-1474491064456313409Mon, 22 Sep 2014 12:13:00 +00002014-09-22T05:23:25.130-07:00How to use a gun: Metro versus Modern Warfare<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eE2j0sPkkcg/VCAPtiugjnI/AAAAAAAAAjk/aSJYms6IpTY/s1600/736700_559523160742820_1695833390_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eE2j0sPkkcg/VCAPtiugjnI/AAAAAAAAAjk/aSJYms6IpTY/s1600/736700_559523160742820_1695833390_o.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>In his ongoing critical <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH-sDMLGR8c">Let's Play of Modern Warfare</a>, Brendan Keogh often describes how the games demonstrate, purposefully, the West's mastery of war through technology. The scenes involving night-vision goggles, laser sights, Predator drones and Javelin missiles are designed, principally, Keogh says, to show the awesome power of modern combat tech, to present, without criticism, the intellectual and industrial might of today's superpowers and how it allows them to more effectively destroy nations.<br /><br />To take that further, I think the "feel" of weapons, specifically guns, in the Modern Warfare games communicates a kind of sleekness, an ease of use. Just like a Predator missile, which can be used to murder entire squads of soldiers with the push of a button, the guns in Modern Warfare are, for the player, incredibly simple to use. There is an aim button, a fire button, a reload button and, in some cases, a button to switch to a secondary fire mode. Ammunition is always provided and you begin each level already equipped with the perfect weapon for your upcoming firefight, for example in the "All Ghillied Up" mission, where you're given a silenced sniper rifle.<br /><br />The ability to kill, and kill effectively, is handed to you in Modern Warfare. Rarely will you run out of bullets. Rarely, if ever, will you find that your guns are not ideally suited to your situation. These weapons operate flawlessly with just the use of four buttons on your control pad. They feel like a natural extension of your character's arm. In fact, they feel like they are you character's arm. He rarely does anything with his hands except hold and fire a gun. Even tactile actions like planting a bomb or pushing a button are performed instantaneously, invisibly - rather than see yourself reach out and actually press something, the object is simply "activated", as if by telepathy, when you get close to it and press the action button. Guns, immaculately designed, perfectly functioning guns, are all your hands are for in Modern Warfare, and that robs the violence of a lot of its gravity.<br /><br />Compare that to Metro: Last Light. In the opening level, the first thing you character does is pick up a map and a cigarette lighter from his desk, and you actually see his hands. You're then instructed, via the game's tutorial text, that to use the map you have to press select to get it out of your bag then hold R2 to bring it up to your face. If you're in a dark environment, you can simultaneously hold L2 to hold the lighter up to it, enabling you to better see the compass. Straight away you have a sense of your character's body and of how physical actions actually work. Unlike Modern Warfare, where you can instantaneously produce weapons and explosives with the push of one button, in Metro, the act of fetching something for your equipment is mapped to the controller in a way that represents how it would work in real life. Select to reach into your bag, R2 to look at the item. You don't popcorn spawn items into your hands. The weapons and equipment are exterior to your character, objects that he has to consciously decide to interact with. He is separate from these items.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SkmJ9SV9-Bg/VCAPzisvf1I/AAAAAAAAAjw/pondozu_XWs/s1600/Metro_tablet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SkmJ9SV9-Bg/VCAPzisvf1I/AAAAAAAAAjw/pondozu_XWs/s1600/Metro_tablet.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></div><br />You then proceed to an armory and are asked to select three different weapons to carry with you on your first mission. It's a minor detail, but structurally it's much more effective than simply handing the player his ideal equipment, Making a conscious decision on what guns to take with you passes some of the responsibility over to you - it makes you complicit in the violence, since any act committed with these guns will be committed because you decided to bring them with you. It also calcifies that sense of guns as exterior objects, as tools you have to choose and physically collect. They don't simply appear in your hands - they don't teleport around with you, wherever you go. Once again, these are external objects. The live in the armory, not on the end of your arms.<br /><br />The armory selection screen is also interesting. The interface is slick and easy to navigate, but when you scroll over the next weapon, you see it physically appear in the game world - a revolving shelf on the armory counter rolls around, with a loud clank, each time you scroll to the next gun. Once again, you have the impression that these are physical, separate objects, that have to be properly housed and displayed within the environment. They don't exist merely in floating menus, only seen by the player. They are actually there, in front of you and the other, non-playable characters. Again, guns are not just a part of your body. They have properties of their own. The exist externally to you.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kgX6yxx44uE/VCAPzDyk7QI/AAAAAAAAAjs/ZYII6FpRWPI/s1600/Guns.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kgX6yxx44uE/VCAPzDyk7QI/AAAAAAAAAjs/ZYII6FpRWPI/s1600/Guns.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><br />The aesthetic of Metro aids this idea of items and weapons as external objects. Set during the aftermath of a global nuclear war, within the Russian subway system, the eponymous metro, there's naturally a focus on resources and equipment. With no natural light available (the surface of the Earth is uninhabitable due to radiation) the citizens of the metro rely on generators and lengths of copper wiring to provide their power. Throughout the game you encounter dozens of jury-rigged human settlements, roughly connected to dwindling sources of electricity and recyclable air. One of the key stealth mechanics, in fact, is shutting down the lights in an area where there are guards, which can be done either by flipping the switches on a fuse box or unscrewing lightbulbs by hand.<br /><br />You also carry a gas mask. Again, like the map, in order to use it you have to first hold the L1 button and then tap square, a kind of shorthand for getting it from your bag and strapping it to your face. More important is that is uses up air filters, which you must constantly scrounge and replace once they become empty. It can also be damaged, in which case you can see physical cracks on its visor, and dirtied. If you're walking on the surface and fall into a puddle, brown water smears will appear on the outside of the mask. You can rub these off by tapping L1, which makes your character lift his hand and physically wipe the visor.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-d1HosDqLRQM/VCAP8hLacFI/AAAAAAAAAkU/xyZ2UtGTf4Q/s1600/metro-last-light-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-d1HosDqLRQM/VCAP8hLacFI/AAAAAAAAAkU/xyZ2UtGTf4Q/s1600/metro-last-light-1.png" height="171" width="320" /></a></div><br />Then you have the flashlight. Continued use will cause its power to dwindle, but you can recharge it by again going into your bag with L1 and collecting a small, handheld kinetic charger, which you have to pump by repeatedly tapping the R2 button. After a few squeezes, the beam from your flashlight will return to full strength.<br /><br />These items, components and appliances have actual working mechanisms. You don't simply press an action button, or walk over a new filter, which is then added to your inventory and automatically replaces your old filter once it runs out. You have to physically operate these machines. You have to maintain and manage them. You will see your character's hands reach up and unscrew his old filter, or depress the handle on the portable charger. Once again, you have that sense of equipment being external, of your character being one entity in the game, his guns and items another. It's the opposite of Modern Warfare wherein weapons simply are, simply work. My favourite tool in Metro is the compressed air rifle, which you physically have to pump back full of air after a few shots. Your character unhooks it, holds it sideways and you have to tap R2 to pump it up. With each pump, you hear your character strain a little more, see his arms moving slower, as if, as the canister becomes full, the pumping is more difficult. It's tangible. It doesn't just give your character a more defined physical presence, it it makes the weapon seem exactly as it is - a tool, an object.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xAtUoeXurt8/VCAPz3xQSVI/AAAAAAAAAj0/JZj_yPsdAM0/s1600/Universal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xAtUoeXurt8/VCAPz3xQSVI/AAAAAAAAAj0/JZj_yPsdAM0/s1600/Universal.jpg" height="238" width="320" /></a></div><br />And that representation diminishes its mystique, its impressiveness. The guns and technology in Metro are not flawlessly working things which magically appear in the player's hands. They're fallible. They have circuits, pumps and gears. Although, sadly, it never actually happens, you get the impression that the gun you're holding might backfire and explode at any moment, that the clip might fall out or the bolt might catch. In turn, that makes you feel more vulnerable. It makes you feel like this fragile item, be it your lighter, your gas mask or your rifle, is all that is between you and death. When you kill it doesn't feel easy or blithe. It feels like you've had to work for it, like you've had to collect your guns and equipment, carry them around with you in this backpack, maintain them and learn to use them. It makes the act of killing much more deliberate and conscious, since you've had to do all of this work to get to here. You didn't just appear with a perfect gun and start shooting. You went through a multiple step process, of selecting your equipment, carrying your equipment, maintaining your equipment, using your equipment. The violence is committed not by this technology, but by you, using this technology.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GQpRn2D9l2E/VCAP5HdRj3I/AAAAAAAAAkM/_Crr8jymh4s/s1600/metro-last-light_gameplay_11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GQpRn2D9l2E/VCAP5HdRj3I/AAAAAAAAAkM/_Crr8jymh4s/s1600/metro-last-light_gameplay_11.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><br />That's the fundamental difference. Keogh is right that Modern Warfare repeatedly boasts about today's military technology, but it doesn't do that simply for the sake of spectacle. It also frees the player of responsibility - it's the technology doing the dirty work, not them. In turn, that representation exonerates the Western superpowers. They may be complicit in the killing, but since their technology is so well-oiled, it is doing most of the heavy-lifting. Like the player, who is simply a gun and an ammo meter, Modern Warfare presents today's soldiers as mere carriers for these sophisticated weapons, vectors through which assault rifles and drones operate. It strips away a sense of being there, a sense of cognition or guilt. It suggests that the technology, the supremely powerful technology, is really the perpetrator here. That makes the in-game violence superficial, the real-world violence seem somehow justifiable.<br /><i><br /></i><i>You can support Brendan Keogh's critical Let's Play of Modern Warfare <a href="http://www.patreon.com/brkeogh">here</a>.&nbsp;</i>http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/09/how-to-use-gun-metro-versus-modern.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-7255045734956454268Wed, 17 Sep 2014 20:23:00 +00002014-09-17T13:23:22.360-07:00P.T. and How to Make Horror in Videogames<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BQKDEgs5Zpg/VBnsBqLynVI/AAAAAAAAAiY/m90RZlJXDLo/s1600/stanleypt.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BQKDEgs5Zpg/VBnsBqLynVI/AAAAAAAAAiY/m90RZlJXDLo/s1600/stanleypt.png" height="176" width="320" /></a></div><br />The best horror games require walkthroughs. By that I mean anything that's so straightforward you can blaze through it unimpeded isn't a horror game - it's an actioner. Horror is about confusion, disorientation, attrition. I'm thinking of Dallas crawling through the Nostromo's unending vents, Danny lost in the Overlook hedge maze. Monsters and jump scares don't make for good horror. You need to create a pervasive sense of wrongness, a kind of inaudible low hum of unease. A friend of mine said he always felt sick when watching The Shining but couldn't work out why until he saw <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sUIxXCCFWw">this documentary</a> on the film's set design. It's these kind of subtle abnormalities that really leave a lasting impression, that define a film, a book or a game that will get to its audience and stay with them. You don't throw it in their face. You leave it hanging there, quietly and unmentioned, like a portrait that seems to follow you around the room.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-76ziCUElT24/VBnsHto-9BI/AAAAAAAAAig/WQeUtPqFx3k/s1600/2647315-4388520866-14079.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-76ziCUElT24/VBnsHto-9BI/AAAAAAAAAig/WQeUtPqFx3k/s1600/2647315-4388520866-14079.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><br />I've written about this before, specifically in regards to <a href="http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/07/resident-evil-bring-back-puzzles.html">Resident Evil</a> and <a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2014/03/03/silent-hill/#.VBnqjvldXD8">Silent Hill</a> (the games - not the piss poor movies.) The point I wanted to make is that modern horror, for all its spiky monsters, orchestral music and body shock (see Dead Space) is infinitely less effective than those PS1 survival titles. They have an internal puzzle logic that the player isn't familiar with. In Silent Hill's case, the environment physically shifts to confound and wrongfoot. You have an undercurrent of strangeness. Games are built on rules, and when those rules seem to organically and unceremoniously change as you play, that creates an enormous sense of dread.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qsA17vMM0ek/VBnsMxgg3vI/AAAAAAAAAio/Y5KczD7CiQ8/s1600/maxresdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qsA17vMM0ek/VBnsMxgg3vI/AAAAAAAAAio/Y5KczD7CiQ8/s1600/maxresdefault.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><br />That brings me to P.T., or Silent Hills, the upcoming game from Metal Gear disastermind Hideo Kojima and Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo Del Toro. I just got finished playing the 40-minute teaser demo and, despite masses of reservations, particularly towards Koj, who wouldn't know subtlety if it broke character and started screaming and pissing in his face, I'm very intrigued. In fact, fuck it, I'm more than intrigued. Inside forty minutes P.T. has done more to advance horror in videogames than an entire decade of over-the-shoulder so-called action/horror games. This game was scary, properly fucking scary. I got an email at one point - some work thing - and it was like Christmas. I was relieved to have an excuse to put the controller down and do something else for a few minutes. That's not hyperbole. I promise I'm not exaggerating to make a statement. My sister was in the room with me as I played and she asked what I thought about it. I said I was dreading it being released, because it would mean playing the whole thing ahead of a review.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TVGcSL6cP78/VBnsUDrWDxI/AAAAAAAAAiw/ozVmdZCj9Rc/s1600/2644400-nvfbj9x.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TVGcSL6cP78/VBnsUDrWDxI/AAAAAAAAAiw/ozVmdZCj9Rc/s1600/2644400-nvfbj9x.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><br />There are obvious things about P.T. that are scary, from the Lynchian, screaming, malformed fetus that lives in a sink to the sporadic appearances of "Lisa", a hulking, bloodied ghost figure that malevolently watches the player throughout the game's run time. But what's really important here is that P.T. all takes place in a single corridor. You walk into it, look around a little, perhaps solve one of the game's mind-mangling puzzles (more on those later) then walk out the other end, only to re-appear back where you started. Each time you loop in and out, the corridor changes, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. Sometimes you'll go back through it and notice that, unlike before, the bathroom door is ajar. Other times you'll round the corner and see Lisa, stood still, gazing back at you. Furniture comes and goes. Writing appears and disappears from the walls. This is an environment that you intrinsically understand - it's a basic L-shape, it's in a fairly standard suburban home, you're forced to walk through it dozens of times - but constantly feel unsure about. P.T. hands the player a seemingly simple task - walk through this corridor - but continually wrongfoots them, not just by making them repeat the task over and over again but by slipping in new and terrifying elements each time.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0inH_dzM7kQ/VBnsagGH2xI/AAAAAAAAAi4/30LgXukWg-0/s1600/SH-PT_08-720x405.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0inH_dzM7kQ/VBnsagGH2xI/AAAAAAAAAi4/30LgXukWg-0/s1600/SH-PT_08-720x405.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><br />It's a disorientating twist on videogame logic. The standard structure of a "mission" requires players to get from point A to point B, perhaps ticking off a few secondary objectives along the way. It's concrete and logical - like reaching the top of the Snakes 'n' Ladders board, it makes basic ludic sense. But P.T. casts that asunder. It not only disregards the rudimentary "start here, get here" videogame set-up, it refuses to let the player feel like they've learned something. Walking the same two halls over and over should make the player feel inveterate, bored even, like playing the most common map once again in a multiplayer shooter. Our most important tool in a videogame is knowledge - knowledge of enemy AI, knowledge of systems, knowledge of our own abilities. P.T. undercuts that dynamic, and makes a point of doing so. It asks you to repeat the same "mechanic," i.e. walking through the corridor, but changes that experience each time. It's as if you're playing Mario and every time you hit the jump button he does something different. By constantly changing, P.T. behaves less like a game, a rules-based, computational, decipherable game, and more like our own world, which behaves randomly and is affected by natural forces that aren't instantly obvious to us. That's why P.T. is scary. It doesn't seem to have rules or systems behind it. The logic is loose. Once you start to realise the surreal and myriad ways that these two corridors are changing, you begin to suspect that anything could happen.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--9aaukGunZY/VBnshV3mjsI/AAAAAAAAAjA/VygzIGOWKMw/s1600/Silent-Hills-635x357.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--9aaukGunZY/VBnshV3mjsI/AAAAAAAAAjA/VygzIGOWKMw/s1600/Silent-Hills-635x357.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></a></div><br />And it does. I'm talking specifically about the puzzles here, which are designed on the most lateral, absurd, unlogic I've ever seen a game. One involves running around the corridors in an infinite loop until you find a minuscule hole in the wall, then peering into it and listening to some screams. Another, the last one, can only be solved by making the fetus thing in the sink laugh three times. The game doesn't tell you that that's the solution, nor does it tell you how to make it happen. There are no hints - none at all. It's only through pure coincidence and wandering back and forth for hours on end that the internet has finally come up with some answers, and they're <a href="http://uk.ign.com/wikis/silent-hills/P.T._Demo_Walkthrough">bizarre</a>.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VPQzkD-DeRA/VBnsmIMkQhI/AAAAAAAAAjI/LChFpORI3yg/s1600/pfnxvta.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VPQzkD-DeRA/VBnsmIMkQhI/AAAAAAAAAjI/LChFpORI3yg/s1600/pfnxvta.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div><br />I love this. I love how unapologetic and un-fun and fucking horrible it is. Again, it's anti-videogame. It belies the idea of an answer, a solution, a victory. Things just sort of happen in P.T. And truly, it's the closest I've seen anything come to faithfully depicting what it's like to have a nightmare. That's a trite compliment, often chucked at things like Inland Empire or Eraserhead, but it's really, really true here. In P.T. you're just lost. You're fucking lost. You have no idea how anything works, what to do, where you are. It's not an abstracted, black hole kind of world, it's something from your waking life, and that's what makes it powerful. That's what makes it like a nightmare. You're in this corridor, this formally laid out couple of hallways, but it's gone wrong. It doesn't work the way it should. Nothing works the way it should.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wM1S_4kbXns/VBnswHRFazI/AAAAAAAAAjQ/IsTg4J8AoRY/s1600/pt20140813003856b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wM1S_4kbXns/VBnswHRFazI/AAAAAAAAAjQ/IsTg4J8AoRY/s1600/pt20140813003856b.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></a></div><br />You're in a videogame. But it's gone wrong.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BQKDEgs5Zpg/VBnsBqLynVI/AAAAAAAAAic/NXghoYZWbsA/s1600/stanleypt.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BQKDEgs5Zpg/VBnsBqLynVI/AAAAAAAAAic/NXghoYZWbsA/s1600/stanleypt.png" height="176" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/09/pt-and-how-to-make-horror-in-videogames.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-938060953636141559Tue, 12 Aug 2014 12:26:00 +00002014-08-12T05:30:38.437-07:00Defeat, exhaustion in Wolfenstein: The New Order<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5LQXaHUeBt0/U-oFgloxI4I/AAAAAAAAAhM/2OD0rV7oDDw/s1600/bj.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5LQXaHUeBt0/U-oFgloxI4I/AAAAAAAAAhM/2OD0rV7oDDw/s1600/bj.png" height="129" width="320" /></a></div><br />Wolfenstein: The New Order is a game about struggle and fatigue. It comes possibly from the studio culture at developer MachineGames, specifically creative director Jens Matthies, who quit his job at Starbreeze to set-up the company and was on the brink of having to sell his house when the game's publication deal finally came through. Matthies and Machine had to fight, hard, to get Wolfenstein made. That experience with strain bleeds into the game's narrative.<br /><br />It's set up from the beginning. First you're told it's 1946 and the Nazi war machine is expanding at "an astonishing rate." Straight away, something is terribly wrong. The war has lasted a year longer than it's supposed to and, rather than flummox itself on the Russian front, the German army has clearly got its shit together - it's winning, big time. Then you take control and the weapon you have, this American-made sub-machine gun, is puny and quiet. By the time you get to shooting the first bad guys you've seen their super-fast fighter jets, their armoured attack dogs, their giant, stomping robots. You feel instantly outclassed. The German infantry rifle is black and heavy - it fills your vision. The US one is light. It's this clattering pop gun made of wood and tin.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4qLLvRvT_Vo/U-oGdb0pxhI/AAAAAAAAAhc/84cgSOW1ka8/s1600/Wolfenstein-The-New-Order-141.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4qLLvRvT_Vo/U-oGdb0pxhI/AAAAAAAAAhc/84cgSOW1ka8/s1600/Wolfenstein-The-New-Order-141.jpg" height="136" width="320" /></a></div><br />Your commanding officer even instructs you to pilfer any Nazi ordnance. "It's bound to be better than ours," he says. From the go you're on the weaker side, the losing team. Like Matthies, trying to build his studio and stave off bankruptcy, you're in an uphill battle.<br /><br />B.J. Blazkowicz is a tired character. It's in his eyes when Anya tells him the US has surrendered, in the way he whispers all his threats, barely flinches at physical pain. This guy has been through it all, twice, and he's just running on fumes the whole game. By the climax, when he tells his pals to go ahead and bomb the complex he's infiltrated, with him still inside, you get the impression that he just wants to die. He's crawling, covered in blood, severely wounded, ready to fucking go. He's like Max in Max Payne 3 - he wants to be dead, but he can't commit suicide. The best he can hope for is a glorious end, to go out swinging. He just wants to settle his scores and get his house in order before finally keeling over. Why else would he keep going on these suicide missions?<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PjHxQ9OWSQY/U-oGDngxFOI/AAAAAAAAAhU/9exzIGyAlCM/s1600/RoW_Fergus_WolfNewOrder.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PjHxQ9OWSQY/U-oGDngxFOI/AAAAAAAAAhU/9exzIGyAlCM/s1600/RoW_Fergus_WolfNewOrder.jpg" height="320" width="246" /></a></div><br />His comrades are equally exhausted. Look at Fergus, the aforementioned CO. When you meet him again in 1960, he's thin and covered in scars. The first thing he does when he's freed from a Nazi prison is collapse onto his bed, telling B.J. to fuck off, he needs some sleep. He sits in his room, agonising over his age, about being past his best. These aren't valiant, unbending heroes. They're reluctant. They're tired. They're here purely out of obligation and they want it to end.<br /><br />The sex scenes are great. There is passion between B.J. and Anya, but they also fuck because they need to - they need something to stave off reality. "Sometimes Christmas," says B.J., "sometimes birthdays. Sometimes mayhem, suffering and death. Sometimes you just need to feel something good." It's tragic, that all this mess has seeped into something as joyful as screwing. But those sex scenes aren't anything close to erotic. They're melancholic, desperate. They're just another part of the B.J.'s defiance of Nazi rule.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fjsjoM2nE70/U-oGkWBeALI/AAAAAAAAAhk/879WTTaUk1w/s1600/maxresdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fjsjoM2nE70/U-oGkWBeALI/AAAAAAAAAhk/879WTTaUk1w/s1600/maxresdefault.jpg" height="133" width="320" /></a></div><br />And there are Tekla and J, two supporting characters who have been defeated by the Nazis in very different ways. J is supposed to be Jimi Hendrix, and he's so completely given up, to the point where he can't even acknowledge there's a war going on. He sits around the resistance HQ dropping acid and playing guitar into some headphones. He's distant, distracted - he's opted out of this struggle because he just can't face it. The bandanna he wears over his face, to cover scars presumably obtained when the Nazis bombed America, is a perfect symbol. He's hiding from the world, from himself, hiding the fact that all this is even going on. He's retreated inside his own head. He talks like it's free-love, liberation, a kind of righteous pacifism, but this is a world where the hippy movement never happened, where the anti-Nazi organisations need all the fighters they can get, and his dialogue comes over like defeatist self-delusion. He makes it sound like he won't fight on moral grounds, but he's just beaten.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ggxra4FI5B4/U-oI4Gt8bUI/AAAAAAAAAhw/wHCmCnnZTAY/s1600/wno1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ggxra4FI5B4/U-oI4Gt8bUI/AAAAAAAAAhw/wHCmCnnZTAY/s1600/wno1.jpg" height="161" width="320" /></a></div><br />Tekla is similar. She talks about fighting as if it's below her, as if her maths and calculations and philosophising about the nature of reality are more important. But you get the sense that she's just trying to find a way to rationalise all this evil. She doesn't sleep - she has these strange ticks and eccentricities. In the game's most saddening scene, she wakes up B.J. to discuss her theory about consciousness and the human spirit, and it all sounds kind of bright and interesting, in a college sort of way. But she keeps going on, rambling and rambling, and you start to feel like she's broken - like her mind has snapped. All her equations, her endless pages of numbers and notes on the predictable nature of reality, seem like a coping mechanism, as if she's trying to decipher some kind of rational, scientific reason behind the Nazi's senseless evil. She can't accept that anything happens randomly, that people do things just because. You get the sense that she's exhausted and baffled by the casual violence of the Nazi regime, that she can't live with the idea that people are just bad, that terrible things happen on a whim. All her ruminating is a way of putting the war into context, of distancing it, saying it's part of some grand scheme that had to happen and eventually will come good. She's trying to nullify the threat - if all these people die, including her, then at least it was for a reason. But she's just going around in circles. She never finds her answers. It's all talk and no result. The painful truth is that the cosmos is not coming to save her.<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gGL2RergN0U" width="480"></iframe><br /><br />All this emotion is consolidated into the music on the main menu screen, written by Michael John Gordon. Just listen to it. It's a moaning, distressed, heavy track, oppressive and terrifying and drawn out. It exemplifies the themes of exhaustion and misery that run through both the story of Wolfenstein and its development. Fucking perfect:<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Twp0RuPFzP0" width="480"></iframe><br /><br /><br />http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/08/defeat-exhaustion-in-wolfenstein-new.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-8052220903525627354Thu, 03 Jul 2014 21:42:00 +00002014-07-03T14:43:09.285-07:00Resident Evil: Bring Back Puzzles<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0CKhiwBU1ro/U7XMOK-DBWI/AAAAAAAAAW0/KMI06GHiNDE/s1600/37467-Resident_Evil_2_%5BDual_Shock%5D_%5BCD2%5D_%5BU%5D-4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0CKhiwBU1ro/U7XMOK-DBWI/AAAAAAAAAW0/KMI06GHiNDE/s1600/37467-Resident_Evil_2_%5BDual_Shock%5D_%5BCD2%5D_%5BU%5D-4.jpg" height="205" width="320" /></a></div><br />Put a red gem into a stuffed tiger's eye to get a pistol. Set fire to a painting to find a jewel. Stick a coin in a fountain to retrieve a key.<br /><br />These are the solutions to puzzles in Resident Evils 1 and 2. Lateral, weird, amusing, they're examples of twisted survival horror logic, where bizarre combinations of items are usually the way forward. Time was scary games thrived on this shit: Silent Hill, Clock Tower and Hellnight are all late-nineties examples of backwards horror conventions. But around 2000, and the launch of Resident Evil 3, things started to change. Abstraction gave way to concreteness. Confusion replaced confidence. Horror was cast aside in favour of action. Rather than daffy game logic, ostensible frightening games started to operate on more familiar, real-world terms. The central puzzle in RE3 is finding components to fix the engine of a tram car: fuse, oil, battery. Contrast that with RE2, where the rear exit of a police station is opened using electronic keys shaped like chess-pieces, and you see where survival horror was heading. It was changing, along with the rest of old-guard game genres at the start of the 21st century, into something more akin to an "experience". It was becoming slick, cohesive, uncomplicated. In this new hybrid brand of action-horror, tangled puzzle logic had no position. It'd just slow people down, make them frustrated. It had to go.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-csWOr52rrV4/U7XMUY4Tm5I/AAAAAAAAAW8/r0IBwecIbMI/s1600/Resident-Evil-2-Chief-Irons.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-csWOr52rrV4/U7XMUY4Tm5I/AAAAAAAAAW8/r0IBwecIbMI/s1600/Resident-Evil-2-Chief-Irons.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div><br />Which brings us to today, a time when game developers wouldn't know good horror if it jumped them from the back seat of a car. It's not that designers like Visceral or Frictional have forgotten about horror. It's that, in a blind rush to do something with the genre that's new, these guys have neglected everything save for monsters and combat. That's all horror is now. It's a weak mix of creatures and subversive mechanics. In Dead Space the enemies are all crazy arms. You have to - fnar fnar - shoot their limbs, not their bodies. In Amnesia, the monster has a wild face and you can't fight it at all. Slender, Outlast, Penumbra, Daylight - these games all trade on the same floor. As long as the creature looks weird (or distinctive enough to use in the promotional art) and the combat system is odd (odd enough that it'll draw a reaction from bored reviewers) the directors on these games seem satisfied. They've given up on horror as a quixotic ordeal. It's about what makes sense on a design document.<br /><br />Pitch confusing puzzles to a publisher or focus group and sure, you'll get a negative (read: shortsighted) response. But put them in your game anyway and bang, you're scarier than everything else on the market. Because this is what horror<i> is</i>. Horror isn't safety or understanding - horror isn't about getting it. Horror is running through the woods not knowing what the Blair Witch looks like. Horror is turning a corner in the Overlook Hotel and coming face-to-face with two dead girls. Horror is the impossible milky innards of Ash, the surprise death of Father Karras. Horror is uncertainty, lack of agency, surprise. It's a puzzle where the solution is the last thing you'd expect, a mansion where guns are hidden in stuffed animals, a police station where the doors are unlocked with chess pieces.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S1ERC4BNBm8/U7XMaisf4PI/AAAAAAAAAXE/Jn_oQHDzNuQ/s1600/psx-51-21326436864.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S1ERC4BNBm8/U7XMaisf4PI/AAAAAAAAAXE/Jn_oQHDzNuQ/s1600/psx-51-21326436864.jpg" height="183" width="320" /></a></div><br />It's about displacement, see? You take the player, put them in a seemingly banal environment, then flip that shit over. Think of the apartment block in Rosemary's Baby. It should be normal, but thanks to Polanski's low angles, and Cassavettes's always off kilter delivery, it doesn't feel <i>right. </i>Same goes for the mansion, or the RPD building. These are places players feel like they should recognise, but because the keys are all funny and the doors are all bolted by abstract locking systems, it's backwards - it's vaguely fucking wrong. Puzzles aren't important because they break up homogenous gameplay, or because they're a tip of the hat to point and click fans. They're fundamentally a part of horror because they pump, surreptitiously, misinformation into the player's mind. It's like listening to a pop song at three quarters speed. It isn't in your face - it isn't teasing you, smugly, that you can't kill the monster. It's benign. It's getting in your brain.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TG_9iLtDcbU/U7XMi1TRPvI/AAAAAAAAAXM/khc9aCcBMJI/s1600/Kenneth_J._Sullivan_-_August_1995_build.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TG_9iLtDcbU/U7XMi1TRPvI/AAAAAAAAAXM/khc9aCcBMJI/s1600/Kenneth_J._Sullivan_-_August_1995_build.png" height="240" width="320" /></a></div><br />If you want to know where the horror really went...it wasn't shot out of the barrel of a machine-gun, via an over-the-shoulder perspective. It was delicately written out. It was filtered away by a bunch of developers who thought that wrongfooting people was what it meant to be scary. Horror games today are the equivalent of a jump scare - they're in your face, with their massive conceits, yelling "GOT YA!". &nbsp;It's all for show. It's all ironed-out and deliberate. Real horror is strange and abortive - it's rough and non-sensical. If people want scary back, they need to start hiding more keys in more tigers.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qAJdfryIHLo/U7XMosLNAlI/AAAAAAAAAXU/ptI5XpG9BUs/s1600/37466-Resident_Evil_2_Dual_Shock_CD1_U-7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qAJdfryIHLo/U7XMosLNAlI/AAAAAAAAAXU/ptI5XpG9BUs/s1600/37466-Resident_Evil_2_Dual_Shock_CD1_U-7.jpg" height="191" width="320" /></a></div><br />http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/07/resident-evil-bring-back-puzzles.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-3614047036083006672Mon, 30 Jun 2014 10:31:00 +00002014-06-30T03:36:28.171-07:00Let me tell you about freelancing<br />I've seen a lot of posts from editors over the last week lamenting the state of game criticism, or positing ways that it needs to change. A lot of what they say is noble, well-meaning, but they always miss something out: for any of this to happen, people need to start opening their fucking wallets.<br /><br />I can't tell you how many times I've had this email: "Hey Ed. I really like this idea, but unfortunately we don't have the budget for this right now." Sure. Fine. By all means, sites can spend their money on trips to E3, analysis of trailers of whatever the fuck. But it's a bit rich for the editors of said sites to then turn around and start rhapsodising about game crit being in a bad way. If it's better writing you want, you have to pay for it. Like anyone interested in games, I'd love to see more long-form features and analysis, more proper journalism. But I'm not in this just because it's a worthy cause. This is my job. I have rent to pay. If you don't have the budget for this kind of work, because you've spunked it all on travelling to where a PR said you should, then tough shit. You have to pay for change. You can't tear down the current status quo in the hope of rebuilding it on the back of good will. What we want - what we need - is for decent game criticism to become a viable business. And you, you editors who seem to want this change more than anything, you're the ones controlling the money, so start spending it on the right things. Your readers will read whatever you give them. Most of them are tired of the same old shit anyway - most of them have been playing games for years and can smell a bullshit story from a mile off. We all want to feel like games are of genuine cultural worth. Gamers want ammunition when it comes to the debate about games being art - they want something to pull out of their pocket when their peers or parents say playing games is a waste of time. So give it to them. Throw some money at the genuinely insightful freelancers who want to write 1500 words on why Splinter Cell is a post-9/11 masterpiece, or why Call of Duty is actually just horseshit. You want change, you want games to be more than they are? Then start fucking paying for it.<br /><br />Or at least be polite. If someone pitches you an article that's researched, articulated and that they've spent a long time thinking about, reply to them, even if you don't want to run it. I know you editors are busy and it's fucking draining to go through and respond to every pitch, but guess what, if you don't keep these people on side, the quality of your output will never improve. Yeah, we're freelance game critics, but we still have SOME pride, and every time we spend weeks working up a good article idea, only to have it flat ignored, it fucking knocks our confidence. Do that to us enough times and soon you won't get any pitches. You'll fucking alienate the people that, ostensibly, you're trying to court. This is a two way street. You want to Change Game Journalism, we want to make some money so at the very least, let's talk. I'm gonna time myself to see how long it takes to write a rejection email: "Hey Ed. Thanks for emailing, but we're gonna pass on this one - thanks." 15 seconds. And when you do it, you won't have to reach for the shift button to put speech marks in. That's it. It might seem like a waste of your time, but one day, that person you ignored could come up with something that wins your site an award.<br /><br />You're probably thinking that I'm some disgruntled fuck who can't get a gig, but no: I'm one of the less than one percent that manages to make a living out of freelance game criticism, and I'm grateful. I won't be going on holiday or nothing, and I never have more than a week's wages in the bank, but I'm surviving, just, which is more than a lot of talented writers - more talented than me - can say for themselves. I'm not writing this because I'm personally pissed off. I've just spotted an hypocrisy is all. Like I said, you can't complain about the state of game criticism and then turn people down because you don't "have the budget." If you legitimately do want change, cough the fuck up for it. Revolutions aren't free. You don't just blow the trains up, you have to pay to make them run on time. If I'm wrong, tell me. If I don't get the budgetary process or the pressures of editorial, let me know. That's a start at least, some fucking communication. And if it can't be done - if our New Wave of criticism isn't financially stable - then just say it. I'll go back to my old job, working on the construction site. I'll make ends meet, work on my novel in the evenings and ten other hopeful kids will take my place in this faltering so-called industry. If you're never gonna step up and fork out, because you're scared of losing traffic or alienating PRs, just say so. Don't um and ah. Don't blow hot and cold. If this truly is what you all want, then start fucking shelling out for it, because it's not going to happen otherwise. There's the ring. Get the fuck in it. We're ready to write for you and we need the money.http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/06/let-me-tell-you-about-freelancing.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-3466106302676644584Thu, 24 Apr 2014 10:39:00 +00002014-04-24T03:42:44.809-07:00Don't vote UKIP - An email to my dad<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I feel like I wasn't able to properly articulate myself on the phone the other night. So, I've spent a few days doing some research and fact-collecting and I think you should take the time to read these things over before going to the polls.</span><br /><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First, you asked me about the amount of government money that is spent on foreign aid compared to the amount spent on the NHS.</span><br /><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The DFID (Department for Internal Development) estimates that roughly £11 billion is spent annually by the British government on foreign aid. In its own report, the NHS states that, in the financial year 2012/2013, its budget was £105bn. You find can those statistics for yourself&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-international-development/about/statistics">here</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nhsconfed.org/priorities/political-engagement/Pages/NHS-statistics.aspx">here</a>.&nbsp;</span></div></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I also told you that the spending on foreign aid amounted to roughly 1.1 percent of the UK's total budget. That figure was wrong. It is actually, now, closer to 0.7 percent.&nbsp;</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You might also want to know how that foreign aid money is spent. Again, according to the DFID, 40 percent of it, around £2.1bn, is diverted to African nations. Some recent news stories regarding Africa:</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-&nbsp;<a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/04/23/uk-centralafrica-un-sanctions-idUKBREA3M1HF20140423">Political violence between Muslims and Christians forces 1 million people from the Central African Republic to leave their homes</a>&nbsp;</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-27111884">Conflict between military in Niger and extremist group Boko Haram has claimed 1,500 lives during this year alone</a></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-27132981">Hundred of civilians murdered by rebel militias in South Sudan</a></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A further 25 percent of foreign aid money is sent to Asia, which contains Syria. 150,000 people have now been killed as part of the country's civil war, with a further 2 million forced to leave their homes. If you think this isn't or shouldn't be Britain's problem, it's worth reading up on the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab-Israeli_War">1948 Syrian civil war</a>, which was sparked when Britain took self-interested political control of the country after World War 2. The events of that war and, by proxy, Britain's foreign policy, created deeper divisions between the Arab and Jewish indigenous populations. The current crisis is an aftershock of that.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a rough estimate, the foreign aid budget, per British person, per year, is £200. If you want to take that money away from these people, go ahead, vote UKIP.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Your other concern was Britain's membership of the European Union and how that affects trade, immigration and the budget.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First the financial implications. Britain's largest industry is pharmaceuticals and chemicals, providing roughly 320,000 jobs and generating £53bn each year. 56 percent of all goods sold by this industry are to fellow EU nations, which thanks to European legislation, share common laws regarding the trade and marketing of prescription drugs. If Britain left the EU, and abandoned European law, it would have to individually negotiate deals with all of the 28 EU countries it deals with, an expensive process which would detrimental to the industry.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Membership of the EU also facilitates easier investments into Britain from member states. Collectively, the EU comprises around 500 million people, with a total GDP (gross domestic profit) of £10 trillion. Abandoning the Union would, again, complicate these investments and shrink the UK economy.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A&nbsp;<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-inout-question-why-britain-should-stay-in-the-eu-9213131.html">2013 survey of small and large businesses</a>, conducted by the Confederation of British Industry, found that 78 percent of British business owners would prefer to remain as part of the European Union, due to these trade benefits. Also worth noting is that Britain's paid contribution to the EU, per year, is around £8bn, or less than half a percent of total GDP. That's £130 per person.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bear in mind that Britain is a small, island nation, contributing less than 3 percent of the world's total GDP. Without the clout of the EU behind it, it has no basis to negotiate trade deals with major players such as China and the US. The Global Times, China's state newspaper,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/829371.shtml">wrote in 2013</a>:&nbsp;<span style="line-height: 22px;">"The Cameron administration should acknowledge that the UK is not a big power in the eyes of the Chinese. It is just an old European country apt for travel and study." Britain can't turn its back on the larger global powers. It is not The Empire any more.&nbsp;</span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Baroness Shirley Williams, a former Lib Dem member of the House of Lords, puts it best:</span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div><div style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; line-height: 18.98714256286621px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px !important;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">"The shrinking of the vision will also shrink our ideas, our attitudes and the scale of our innovations. It would be the cautious move of a relatively elderly society deciding to abdicate from any major global role. The once-upon-a-time alternative to the EU, our relationship with America, is no longer the option that it might have been. Our most powerful ally is increasingly multicultural, rather than Anglo Saxon, and its major strategic interests lie predominantly in Asia.</span></div><div style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; line-height: 18.98714256286621px; margin-bottom: 13px; padding: 0px !important;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">"America's interest in us is as a leading member of the EU and that is the one option that gives us global influence. On the economic side, it is clear some international investors will think very hard about staying here should we leave the EU. That is because they see us as a bridge nation – the nation that bridges the Atlantic and acts as a launching pad into the EU single market. If we are not involved in the EU, the key investors in Japan, the US and, increasingly, China will not see us as the best place in which to base their industries."</span></div></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">As part of the EU, Britain also receives aid in the form of Structural Funds, money that is accumulated by member EU states and then awarded on a case-by-case basis.&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 20.799999237060547px;">Over the next five years, England alone will receive over £6 billion in Structural Funds, Wales £2 billion, Scotland £795 million, and Northern Ireland £457 million. Leaving the EU would cost the country this money.</span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 20.799999237060547px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 20.799999237060547px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is perhaps the best article to read on the financial implications of leaving Europe. It's based on a report published by a&nbsp;<u>Eurosceptic</u>&nbsp;think-tank called&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/10/britain-stay-europe-eurosceptic-thinktank-report">Open Europe</a>.</span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 20.799999237060547px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 20.799999237060547px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Abandoning the EU altogether will not be a solution to any, let alone all of the Britain's problems. Instead, a lot of people advocate a process of renegotiation, whereby, things like restrictive EU agricultural laws, which increase the price of food, are opted out of. Britain can be part of the EU and enjoy the trade benefits without having to ascribe to all European laws. That, surely, is a worthy compromise.&nbsp;</span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now, immigration. A few statistics for you from "The In/Out Question," a book by Reuters editor and researcher Hugo Dixon:</span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- EU membership allows free emigration to other member states. There are 1 million British people living in Spain, 330,000 in France, 65,000 in Cyprus and a further 330,000 living in Ireland. If the UK abandoned the EU, and ejected immigrants from the country or closed its borders, it's likely a lot of these people - British emigrants - would likewise be sent back the Britain. Membership allows unbridled travel for tourists and emigres. That's an advantage.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- As for immigrants arriving from the EU, their "inactivity rate" - i.e. people who are unemployed, retired or otherwise not working - is 30 percent. That's compared to 43 percent, when looking at the native UK population. 32 percent of EU immigrants are university educated, compared to 21 percent of native Brits. The point being, a large amount of people arrive from the EU to work, not in menial roles specifically, but in engineering, medicine and other professions. Statistically, "we" are lazier than "them."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/british-public-wrong-about-nearly-everything-survey-shows-8697821.html">Here's another interesting report</a>, based on a survey conducted by King's College London and the Royal Statistical society.&nbsp;It discounts a lot of public perceptions about crime, immigration, benefit payments, foreign aid and employment. The key finding, in regards to UKIP's manifesto, is:</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Some 31 percent of the population is thought to consist of recent immigrants, when the figure is actually 13 percent. Even including illegal immigrants, the figure is only about 15 percent. On the issue of ethnicity, black and Asian people are thought to make up 30 percent of the population, when the figure is closer to 11 percent."</span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Speaking &nbsp;of the UKIP manifesto...</span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/themes/5308a93901925b5b09000002/attachments/original/1397750311/localmanifesto2014.pdf?1397750311">Here it is</a>. Some key points it makes:</span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- "Green spaces should be protected - we oppose HS2, excessive housing development and wind farms." UKIP plans to axe tax subsidies for the construction of wind turbines, and revert to shale gas for the country's main energy supply. Considering global fuel and pollution crises, that seems like a bad idea. However, it's also worth noting that the Conservative government plans to do the same thing, as it believes the UK's wind farm quota has already been filled.</span></span></div><div><span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;">- "We need more police on the streets, cracking down on crime and anti-social behaviour." This is typical firebrand rhetoric which (see above) does not reflect the true situation, i.e., that crime is at an all time low. Worth watching is the documentary The House I Live In, which explains why aggressive, street-bust policing is not a long-term solution to crime.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;">- "Real decision-making should be given to local communities." David Cameron tried this with his "Big Society" idea, but it failed. People want big government, not isolated pockets, governing themselves. Government protects people and their rights. Communities don't.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;">- "Money should be used for local services, not the EU, foreign aid and foreign wars." Again, see above. The money spent on these things is&nbsp;minuscule&nbsp;and widely beneficial to both the UK and people in other countries, to whom this country owes a debt.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;"><a href="http://www.ukip.org/issues">UKIP also says</a>:</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">- "</span>Immigrants must financially support themselves and their dependents for 5 years. This means private health insurance (except emergency medical care), private education and private housing - they should pay into the pot before they take out of it." This is essentially a surreptitious way of saying "no-one will be allowed in." Can you afford private health and education? Can I? Can my friends? No. UKIP is constructing legislation that will, in effect, prevent anybody from being able to afford emigrating to Britain.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- "Enrol unemployed welfare claimants onto community schemes or retraining workfare programmes." I've been unemployed. This won't help. It'll prevent people from looking for more meaningful work. Also, shouldn't these jobs - litter-picking, street-cleaning, so on - be available to people as full-time positions, with wages, benefits, etc? Why should people do this work if they aren't getting proper money for it? How does giving people a job, but still classifying them as unemployed, help to improve the unemployment situation?</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-&nbsp;"Remove the UK from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights." The EU Court of Human Rights is one of the most rigid, progressive defense courts in the world. It protects the rights of women, the disabled and the wrongly accused. Britain is a moral country. It can't abandon this moral organisation.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-&nbsp;"Make welfare a safety net for the needy, not a bed for the lazy. Benefits only available to those who have lived here for over 5 years."&nbsp;<span style="font-size: small;">Contrary to hysterical news reports, the majority of benefit money is claimed by pensioners, not fraudsters and not "the lazy." UKIP is a party that wants to punch down, to trample the most vulnerable members of British society in order to benefit the most&nbsp;</span>privileged<span style="font-size: small;">. It's acting in interest of itself and its members, not the body politic.&nbsp;</span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">- "No to political correctness." This is a vague policy that sounds like it was thought up by Alf Garnett. I don't want to have to listen to white people refer to my black or Asian friends using derogatory words, and to feel like that's acceptable. People should be made to feel guilty about racism, homophobia and sexism. Those things don't represent free-speech, in its noble form at least. They represent unchecked ignorance.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I hope you've read and digested all of this. I hope if you know anyone who is also considering voting UKIP, you'll forward it to them.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">If you vote for UKIP, you're voting for Britain to become un-British. This is a nation that, politically, for the past 100 years, has been geared towards welfare, unbridled capitalism and inclusivity. The founding of the NHS. The deregulation of the stock exchange. Gay marriage laws. These are what define Britain's social and legislative make-up. UKIP would see the country become a&nbsp;shriveled, isolationist island nation, with no power or understanding of the global stage. It's a selfish party. It will not operate in the interests of the British people, let alone the rest of the world.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Please don't waste your vote.</span></span></div>http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/04/dont-vote-ukip-email-to-my-dad.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-7389883602180906335Thu, 10 Apr 2014 01:37:00 +00002014-04-09T18:37:21.318-07:00<br />"Look, in this day and age, you've got to be tooled up."<br /><br />There is, absolutely, no excuse for ignorance. You can't turn on, tune in, drop out - you have the resources and it's your prerogative to use them.<br /><br />Between now and the end of civilization, we, us humans, are in the age of the internet. The acquisition of knowledge is no longer dependent on library cards, learned parents or even schooling. For all intents and purposes anyone anywhere can discover and unpick any piece of information from recorded past and present. We can all know everything. We're the first generation to have access to prosthetic intelligence - even if we don't have a fact or opinion to hand, we can look it up, we can get it.<br /><br />But are we creating a vacuum, a lineage of people who, granted access to all knowledge will in fact end up knowing nothing? Will the persistent and free availability of wisdom foster a populace that is not, in a true sense, wise? When something is benign, ubiquitous, merely just "there" it provokes lethargy and disinterest. People who born into wealth don't appreciate money as much as the pauper, who has worked his whole life to earn enough to buy a house. With information now available everywhere and at every hour of the day, it is no longer precious, no longer a rarity or a resource. There's no urgency in acquiring it. So will we bother?<br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/04/look-in-this-day-and-age-youve-got-to.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-3924052806370421219Thu, 03 Apr 2014 22:27:00 +00002014-04-03T15:27:40.515-07:00In an anxious state<br />No escape from this wretched state. No escape, it seems.<br /><br />The goddamn anxiety. It starts as you might expect. Shortness of breath in crowded shopping centres. Inability to speak in front of large groups of people. And then it progresses. It peels back further into the mind until one day you're too nervous to even stand up and turn off the television set. You lie on the sofa, arms clasped around you, staring into the wall, hoping to God and Jesus that there won't be a knock on the door, that the phone won't ring. You become paralysis. Your mind locks down like a cell block at lights out. Sleep is your only distraction, but it's always rough. You sweat and shiver like the dying patriarch in a Victorian novel. When you wake up an hour later, you continue to lie on your side, eyes half-lidded, totally expressionless. "Maybe," you ask "I should take a walk outside." But your body doesn't answer. Any semblance of self is locked away now in a corner of the mind so tiny the muscles don't listen to it. The disease is in control. It's holding all the keys, pulling all the levers.<br /><br />There must be some kind of way out of here.http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/04/in-anxious-state.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-8453243083943781004Thu, 03 Apr 2014 11:25:00 +00002014-04-03T04:27:28.717-07:00Kill-stealing<br />It occurred to me while playing an online shooter that videogames have birthed the most reprehensible notion in the history of mainstream entertainment: kill-stealing. How in God and Jesus did we allow this to happen? No matter how frightening, bloody or well-dramatised a videogame murder could one day be, while we still conflate killing with winning, our beloved medium will never be artistically acceptable, and rightly so. In good fiction, the death of a person doesn't feel like a victory, either to the audience or other characters. Sonny Corleone, Omar Little, Desdemona. These deaths are detrimental, vicious, a tectonic change in the direction of narrative. But in online games, what we have are men and women arguing about killing in the same way they'd debate who'd deserves the larger half of a pizza. It's lower than trivial. It's plain ugly, like two sharks fighting over a length of intestine. The act of killing isn't about point-scoring or victory. It's about the very ugliest of human emotions, the lowest of low points. Since Space Invaders, videogames have instructed us that the more we kill, the closer we get to winning. And now we're at the zenith, where in our most popular games, people are fighting over who gets to be the murderer, as if chasing pennies scattered across the floor of an arcade. We haven't just made killing fun or spectacular - we've made it life-affirming. We've cultivated an audience of pure sadists, who kill for positive emotional feedback. At this point, even games like Spec Ops: The Line, where the more the character kills, the more insane he becomes, are not enough. On a ludic level, killing in Spec Ops is still the point of the game - it's still the one thing you have to do over and over in order to resolve the narrative, i.e. win. Compared to the symbiotic relationship between killing and winning that lies at the core of videogames, the decent writing and authorial intent in Spec Ops are ignorable. The pattern still repeats itself, in Spec Ops and elsewhere. What can be done?<br /><br /><br />http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/04/kill-stealing.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-8443476766213995767Wed, 02 Apr 2014 09:30:00 +00002014-04-02T02:47:35.979-07:00<br />Miasma. Bad air. You can't see it, but you can feel it entering your body each time you step outside.<br /><br />Being a teenager in the early years of the 21st century was a very special thing to experience, secondary school and university even more so. Now, as an adult, nothing can come close to those short and busy years. There's no freedom or fancy anymore, no love or spontaneity or imagination. Life ends as soon as you become a grown-up. Deep in our hearts, we all know that this is the one chance we get - this is it. And still, we're expected to live up to obligations, expectations and responsibilities. Our lives, our one and only lives, are not meant to be joyful or recognised. We live merely to sustain; to provide; to do what we have to do. We live because there is nothing else to do. Nothing is great. Nothing is good. It's all just ok. And we keep going.<br /><br />Perhaps I'm not thinking straight: &nbsp;there is nothing more morose and self-absorbed than a man in the grips of a month-long depression. But what wouldn't you do to escape this hideousness? And I don't mean your day job, your marriage, your illness. I mean it all, every atom and cloud that comprises what we coin life. Given another option, some different reality, some alternate form of existing, would you take it? If to exist could mean more than just to live, if you were allowed to choose, for example, at birth, what kind of existence you'd prefer, what reality you'd like to live in, what sentient or unsentient being you'd like to be, is this what you would choose? I can't outline specific scenarios - like you, my imagination has crumpled over time under the brunt of proof that this, Earth, the Universe, is the sum total of everything. But try to envision another universe. Space and time but not as you know it. A life completely unfamiliar to you, unsampled by anything that has existed in our reality up to this point. Imagine it - something different, something good - and wonder whether here and now is what you want or merely what you have to make do with.<br /><br />There is, of course, no escape. However much you might want to disappear you are trapped in your body, trapped in this universe by physical logic and laws that prohibit magic.<br /><br />This is the illness talking. I used to see sparks strike every time I opened my eyes. Efficient, structured, discernible - the machinery of our universe was once, in my mind, the most wondrous thing. But now, just five years after I turned 18, it fills me with dread, dread that life, famine, misery, suffering, cruelty, all of it, is inescapable and that life is merely a prison.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/04/miasma.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-2612750115533341746Wed, 26 Mar 2014 22:54:00 +00002014-03-26T15:54:50.856-07:00There are no controversial videogames<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tUhD3G5UshU/UzNaZCKXywI/AAAAAAAAATE/y7l-swTeMt4/s1600/GTA-V-review-13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tUhD3G5UshU/UzNaZCKXywI/AAAAAAAAATE/y7l-swTeMt4/s1600/GTA-V-review-13.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></a></div><br />I criticised Grand Theft Auto V for being toothless and safe, for not feeling punkish in the way the old games did. In part, that's because, unlike in the 90s, when it was a plucky British start-up, Rockstar is now a global conglomerate, helmed by multi-millionaires.<br /><br />But it's also because of how the game treats killing. Contrary to hysterical news reports, the people you murder in GTA are not innocent pedestrians - they're twisted caricatures. A crime game with true grit would have players gun down people who had done nothing wrong. It would make no excuses for the protagonist. GTA lets players feel like their victims deserve it. The pedestrians are all venal, gobby gargoyles, parodies of the most repugnant excesses in Western culture. As they walk by, they make sexist and materialistic remarks, droning about mobile phones, tit jobs and self obsessions. The cops in GTA IV are a fantastic example. They're all fat guys, who stand in the street moaning about immigrants and having to do their job. They're emblematic of bloated, ineffective bureaucracy, the lazy cynicism with which Rockstar approaches American politics. The last thing they are is people. Speaking in loud, so-called humorous soundbytes, they serve merely as sounding boards for the game's didactic. Killing them, when they're so openly and totally despicable, so clearly designed to be hated, is not a controversial act. It's what anyone playing the game would be expected to do.<br /><br />Violence in games is only legitimate if committed against discernible individuals, whose deaths have a traceable, adverse affect on either the fictional world or the narrative. In Grand Theft Auto, neither of these metrics apply. Your victims are cartoon characters and their deaths feel less like tragedy, or drama, and more like housework - like you're cleaning the game world up by eliminating them. Because of that, not only is the violence gratuitous, but the protagonists have no complexity. Once you accept that the people they murder are all bad, all, in a sense, inhuman, no amount of swear-words or defecation jokes can give give GTA's leading men any edge. They aren't hypocritical or difficult to understand. Their behaviour isn't questionable, or in any sense opaque. With satirical dialogue spilling from the mouths of every pedestrian in Grand Theft Auto, the player can rest assured that whomever he kills, he or she is bad. The violence becomes blase, reasoned, acceptable. And the protagonists, repeatedly murdering cartoonish representations of people, rather than people, become as action movie characters: righteous, uninteresting and morally uncomplicated.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-z-M1fOVjga8/UzNanb0tw-I/AAAAAAAAATM/TsaGJX7PXS0/s1600/LCPD-GTA4-fatcops1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-z-M1fOVjga8/UzNanb0tw-I/AAAAAAAAATM/TsaGJX7PXS0/s1600/LCPD-GTA4-fatcops1.jpg" height="163" width="320" /></a></div><br />A truly controversial game would have players murder characters who didn't deserve it, characters who were defenseless, innocent or morally upstanding. A tired example, but Spec Ops: The Line perhaps comes closest to this. Other violent, so-called contentious games, such as Hitman and Manhunt, overemphasise the criminal backgrounds of the people the player kills. Via writing and visual design, they affirm that the player is better than the people he kills; that they are worse than him. It's a cowardly approach that strips violence of all its power, all its meaning. If there's a single reason mainstream game narratives are simplistic, to the point of blandness, it's because writers have never truly embraced the idea of an anti-hero. Max Payne, 47, Niko Bellic, Kane, Lynch, Jackie Estacado - they are all higher on the moral-o-meter than their victims. True controversy doesn't exist in games. The so-called bad guys that we occasionally control are just thinly veiled versions of conventional heroes.<br /><br />http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/03/there-are-no-controversial-videogames.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-2253428980626807387Fri, 21 Mar 2014 13:54:00 +00002014-03-21T07:02:42.209-07:00On Laura in Silent Hill 2<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ePX5Y9xPuHA/UyxC4S7VMSI/AAAAAAAAASg/i6-Kihm7H3k/s1600/Lauraandjames.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ePX5Y9xPuHA/UyxC4S7VMSI/AAAAAAAAASg/i6-Kihm7H3k/s1600/Lauraandjames.png" height="192" width="320" /></a></div><br />At university, while studying Gasper Noe's film Irreversible, my lecturers posited that the beginning of the film, set in a grubby gay club, represented an unclean "masculine" type of sexuality while the ending, with a pregnant Monica Belluci lying down in a field, surrounded by children, depicted an ideal, picturesque version of femininity.<br /><br />This seems to me a patronising, infantalising representation of women, implying they are delicate flowers who need to be protected from the grimness of reality. By outlining the similar representation that pervades Silent Hill 2, I'm in no way endorsing it - I'm simply arguing that it exists.<br /><br />James, of course, stands in for the virulent male sex. He's accompanied by his alter-ego, the serial raping Pyramid Head, and routinely exacts violence against fragile, womanly creatures, such as the mannequins and nurses.<br /><br />Laura on the other hand symbolises cleanliness, purity, virginity. She is untouched by the sexualised world that James has created - she remarks that, unlike him, she doesn't see monsters or anything unusual in the town of Silent Hill.<br /><br />She resembles Maria, the ideal woman James imagines, and by extent Mary, whom Maria is fashioned after, the implication being that Laura is what these two women looked like when they were younger, before they encountered James.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bxY2do6d9-4/UyxDmSSQ6qI/AAAAAAAAASo/ug5Qe3Pa9Zc/s1600/Maria.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bxY2do6d9-4/UyxDmSSQ6qI/AAAAAAAAASo/ug5Qe3Pa9Zc/s1600/Maria.jpg" height="192" width="320" /></a></div><br />Both of these women are affected - governed - by James's male sexual desire: Mary is killed by James because she was too ill to have sex with him and Maria is literally James's imaginary creation, a short skirt wearing, seductive nymph, fashioned to suit his predilections.<br /><br />Laura however is undisturbed, unblemished. She's a female who, throughout the game, is immune to influences of men, i.e. doesn't see what James sees. In that, she stands alone: Mary and Maria are both subject to James's sexual ideals and Angela, it transpires, is traumatised by the childhood sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. All of these women, in the same way that James's psyche influences the world of Silent Hill 2, have had their lives impacted on by the sexual whims of men. They are subjects of male self-interest.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MxxZb8HMNj8/UyxD7EbAM0I/AAAAAAAAASw/xUGBBxB36pg/s1600/MaryPhoto.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MxxZb8HMNj8/UyxD7EbAM0I/AAAAAAAAASw/xUGBBxB36pg/s1600/MaryPhoto.PNG" height="320" width="237" /></a></div><br />With that in mind, the Good Ending of Silent Hill 2, wherein James leaves the town accompanied by a doting Laura, takes on a more sinister tone. Rather than save her, it's as if James has claimed her somehow, as if he's leading her away from the quiet town she envisioned and into an outside world, where women like Mary are murdered for being unable to have sex. Perhaps that's a cynical approach - perhaps, in the end, we see a new James, who has broadened his narrow view of women and learned to relate to them on a deeper, platonic level. But that's up for interpretation. It depends how much you feel for James.<br /><br />However you see it, the theme of men and male desire somehow "corrupting" women remains. Mary is killed because she, by James's ultra-masculine standards, has become useless. Maria exists only as a canvass for James to project onto. And Angela, perhaps most tragic of all, is eventually driven to suicide by the memories of her father, and the abuses he committed to satisfy his lust. Laura, unable to see what James sees, constantly running away from him and calling him "a bad man" is the only female in the game immune to corroding male influence. But in the end perhaps she too becomes the subject of dangerous, misogynistic intent.http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/03/on-laura-in-silent-hill-2.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-6345296471481768439Fri, 21 Mar 2014 12:40:00 +00002014-03-21T05:41:21.019-07:00On the nurses in Silent Hill 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--o1Y75LJa5w/UywyweAt0kI/AAAAAAAAASQ/ydGdMzOHf1A/s1600/sh2-nurse-0021.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--o1Y75LJa5w/UywyweAt0kI/AAAAAAAAASQ/ydGdMzOHf1A/s1600/sh2-nurse-0021.jpg" height="197" width="320" /></a></div><br />The theme of spousal abuse runs throughout Silent Hill 2. I've <a href="http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2013/12/men-at-large-women-in-prison-on-gender.html">written already</a> about James Sunderland's treatment of his wife as a sex object, and his frustrated sexuality. But that was more on a macro level. There is a small, intrinsic part of the game that speaks to the subject of domestic violence, specifically when James encounters the nurse monsters in Brookhaven Hospital.<br /><br />Simply put, the most effective weapon against them is James's boot. Bludgeoning them with a pipe or shooting them with a gun makes them crumple to the floor, but unless James gives them a kick while they're down, they typically stand back up. Of course, James can kick to death other creatures in the game, but it usually takes two or three stomps before they're killed. The nurses however only take one. The sharp, pugilistic kick is a finishing move.<br /><br />It's interesting because of all the creatures in the game, the nurses are the most overtly female: they wear fetishised nurse outfits, own heaving bosoms and have their legs exposed. That they're so vulnerable to James's kick hints at a sense of power, that these women can be kept firmly "in check" by a man using, as it were, his bare hands. The act of James kicking a nurse to death &nbsp;is emblematic of the violent control he exerted over his own wife. It surmises the blunt, terrible force of domestic abuse.<br /><br />Perhaps that's why the nurses have no faces. Though they're the only creatures in Silent Hill 2 that have human heads, those heads are contorted, blank. It's as if by withholding from the nurses any specific identity, any marks or features that would give them individuality, Silent Hill 2 is making a blanket statement about domestic abuse. It affects not one specific person, but people in a generic sense. It isn't isolated to a relationship between two individuals; it's a large, widespread problem, interceding on the lives of an indiscernible mass.<br /><br />Certainly, that has been my experience with it. Domestic abuse can take many different forms and affect many different types of people. It is not necessarily violent or physical, nor is it always psychological or prolonged. It's a vaporous problem. For some people, it's hard to detect or accept that it's happening. Like the nurses' faces, it's hard to make out.<br /><br />http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/03/on-nurses-in-silent-hill-2.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-8261946388336178347Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:13:00 +00002014-03-14T08:15:28.717-07:00No title<br /><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Depression is vague feeling. It attacks like radiation poisoning. You feel different, far away, “off”, but you can't tell why. People will ask you, many times, “what's wrong?” and you'll be unable to answer. On paper, compared to the great majority, your life will be ideal. And any distinct misery you will have experienced – abuse, break-ups, job dissatisfaction – will not be not sufficient an explanation for the cloistering, all-over pain of a long-term disorder. It's hard, really, to explain “what's wrong.” And that, for many, is the handle - the struggle to articulate how this feels. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">With other illnesses, the pain is localised and apparent, occasionally visible. With depression, it's everywhere and nowhere. It's in the taste of your food, the muscles in your legs, the itching in your scalp. It's in your sleep, your intercourse, your speech. But you can't reach out and touch it. You can't pick at it like a scab or wrap it like a wound. You can't reduce its swelling or hack it off, cough it up or sweat it out. Eventually, you reach a point of anhedonia, where depressive thoughts permeate everything and all. Misery becomes an element, like nitrogen or helium, silently present wherever you go. But still there's no open sore. How can you be ill? After all, you look okay.</span></div>http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/03/no-title.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-8723691022468419460Tue, 04 Mar 2014 12:00:00 +00002014-03-04T04:08:38.948-08:00Gentlemen, welcome to Write Club<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-e5bViuoroUo/UxXBO_NUvRI/AAAAAAAAARk/VUWq4fubNrs/s1600/Brad-Pitt-fight-club-body2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-e5bViuoroUo/UxXBO_NUvRI/AAAAAAAAARk/VUWq4fubNrs/s1600/Brad-Pitt-fight-club-body2.jpg" height="204" width="320" /></a></div><br />The first rule of Write Club is: No-one cares about anything you write, ever<br /><br />&nbsp;The second rule of Write Club is: No-one cares about anything you write, EVER<br /><br />The third rule of Write Club is: No matter how good your pitch is, the editor will either be on holiday, on the phone or at lunch when your email arrives.<br /><br />The fourth rule of Write Club is: You won't see money from completed work for at least two months after it's published.<br /><br />The fifth rule of Write Club is: Every idea you want to do has either been covered by other people, isn't of interest to any money-paying publication or is impossible to write about because it requires interviews with people who live by rule 3.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jRiS6B1WLsk/UxW_gI5K-1I/AAAAAAAAARI/_uoYoqnx_NE/s1600/fight-club.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jRiS6B1WLsk/UxW_gI5K-1I/AAAAAAAAARI/_uoYoqnx_NE/s320/fight-club.jpg" /></a></div><br />The sixth rule of Write Club is: The only people who will respond to your work in any sustained way will be people who hate it.<br /><br />The seventh rule of Write Club is: You'll hate yourself for wasting your life writing about videogames. Then you'll hate yourself even more because you can't seem to get even that right.<br /><br />The eighth rule of Write Club is: You'll never make money, be admired, become famous. You'll sit in front of Jimquisition/Zero Punctuation/anything on IGN and wonder what the f*ck it is readers want.<br /><br />The ninth rule of Write Club is: Despite the knocks to your confidence and the moneylessness, this is nevertheless preferable to doing a real job. You're a lazy so-called "creative" and the idea of getting out of bed before *you're* ready to in the morning terrifies you.<br /><br />The tenth rule of Write Club is: You better have a spouse who actually works and is willing to support your bullshit dream. You also better be able to cope with the crushing, only fair guilt of knowing she/he is going out to work while you're trying to explain to Kotaku why your article about the monsters in The Last of Us is a work of searing genius.<br /><br />The eleventh rule of Write Club is: Everyone more successful than you is also much stupider. See rule eight.&nbsp; <br /><br />The twelfth rule of Write Club is: Despite your awkward, weekly pestering of PR reps, review code will never arrive on time. This means you will either a) miss the embargo and cost both yourself and the site you're writing for credibility b) have to write a review of a game you haven't even completed and/or c) miss the invoice submission date for this month and have to wait four weeks until you can bill for the review, by which time your f*cking gas has been shut off.<br /><br />The thirteenth rule of Write Club is: The best way to get published is to fake enthusiasm. Claim you believe games are significantly artistic or a force for change. Everyone loves to jack off. Play up to it. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KM6blI82xL8/UxXAAjeSWOI/AAAAAAAAARQ/W8xdVcCAVeY/s1600/fc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KM6blI82xL8/UxXAAjeSWOI/AAAAAAAAARQ/W8xdVcCAVeY/s320/fc.jpg" /></a></div><br />The fourteenth rule of Write Club is: You'll never be any good.<br /><br />The fifteenth rule of Write Club is: Neither will anyone else.<br /><br />The sixteenth rule of Write Club is: Nothing you write will ever influence the creation of videogames in any way.<br /><br />The seventeenth rule of Write Club is: Previews, press events and expos always have been, are, and always will be a complete f*ucking waste of time.<br /><br />The eighteenth rule of Write Club is: Never ever bloody anything, ever.<br /><br />The nineteenth rule of Write Club is: You can't do this anymore. You wake up every day and it's the same: no emails, no interest, no money. Day by day your conviction is dissolving. You're embarrassed by how poor you are. You're guilty about embellishing your career when you describe it to your friends. All you have are your old articles and you check them daily, hoping they've been commented on or re-shared on Twitter, anything to make you feel like someone, somewhere is interested. You can't take feeling like this. You hate your work but you're also guilty about hating your work. Look at those people doing real jobs, with real responsibilities, and here you are shitting and moaning about having to write (or not write) about poxy videogames. There's no point to you.<br /><br />The twentieth rule of Write Club is: If this is your first week at Write Club, you have to write. <br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uCcLCAuhzU0/UxXAPgeQ1SI/AAAAAAAAARY/nEcFujixxhE/s1600/fight_club13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uCcLCAuhzU0/UxXAPgeQ1SI/AAAAAAAAARY/nEcFujixxhE/s320/fight_club13.jpg" /></a></div>http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2014/03/gentlemen-welcome-to-write-club.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-3940015785180678092Wed, 18 Dec 2013 23:29:00 +00002013-12-18T15:29:43.006-08:00Meaningful Violence in Condemned: Criminal Origins<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gw29i8qvJkE/UrIpztI84iI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/Fk7YIICBmEg/s1600/condemned_criminal_origins_profilelarge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gw29i8qvJkE/UrIpztI84iI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/Fk7YIICBmEg/s320/condemned_criminal_origins_profilelarge.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Condemned: Criminal Origins isn't a fantastic game. The scares are cheap and the plot, though supposedly grounded in reality, devolves into Clive Barker hooey towards the end. But in discussions on videogame violence, I think it makes an interesting example. In two articles I've read recently - <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/206722/Consensual_Torture_Simulator_Is_game_violence_meaningful_enough.php">this interview</a> with Consensual Torture Simulator creator Merrit Kopas, and <a href="http://www.fullbrightdesign.com/2010/07/legitimizing-violence.html">this, by Steve Gaynor</a>, who directed Gone Home - there are arguments that violence in videogames can be approached differently.<br /><br />Kopas says that, without needing better physics or graphics technology, the effect violence has on a human body can be more realistically depicted in games than it is now.<br /><br />Gaynor says that violence is most effective in fiction when it's visited upon characters who have identity, and that rather than cut down swathes of faceless "enemies" videogame players should only commit violence against people with specific relevance to a game's plot and world.<br /><br />Both argue that, in doing these things, videogames can achieve a more meaningful treatment of violence.<br /><br />Condemned gets at least part way there. Starting with Kopas's argument, and the physical effects of violence on a human body, Condemned is a game that, partly, is about the collection of forensic evidence. Your character, Ethan Thomas, is a crime scene investigator for a metropolitan homicide unit and at various points in the game, in the early levels in particular, he has to analyse crime scenes to locate wounds, blood splatters and potential murder weapons. In fact, the first real gameplay in Condemned, prior to any combat, is investigating the murder scene of a young woman who, by taking photographs of her neck and scanning for fingerprints, you determine has been strangled to death.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wgvIXZSItr0/UrIqMq7IOaI/AAAAAAAAAPY/jMgS-ownwZo/s1600/b34.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="254" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wgvIXZSItr0/UrIqMq7IOaI/AAAAAAAAAPY/jMgS-ownwZo/s320/b34.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />It's a framing device for the combat that follows. In this opening scene, players are given to understand the effect that violence has against the human body. They analyse the wounds in detail. They're told precisely what it is that caused this person to die.<br /><br />Rarely do we get this close to the people we kill - or the people we find dead - in videogames. Often their bodies show no physical signs of the gunshots or stab wounds we've inflicted. Other times their corpses disappear altogether, making their deaths, and the violence we commit, completely meaningless, since the game cleanly brushes them aside and continues, literally unchanged.<br /><br />Even games that take an ostensible unsanitary approach to violence fail to depict is consequences. Videogames that receive X-ratings, are derided by the mainstream press and called "realistic" by players often feature hyperbolic and silly depictions of violence. In Manhunt for example players <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGuhX5AmjuA#t=128">can remove an enemy's head using a line of strangulation cord</a>. Visually satisfying though these games may be, they do not accurately depict the physical results of violence committed on the human body, unlike Condemned which, from its very beginning, encourages players to appreciate the damage caused by violence, damage they are going to inflict themselves.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9S8Ej7UzAgQ/UrIsGrnyrZI/AAAAAAAAAPk/r-VA2A9LUM8/s1600/58250_condemned--criminal-origins.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9S8Ej7UzAgQ/UrIsGrnyrZI/AAAAAAAAAPk/r-VA2A9LUM8/s320/58250_condemned--criminal-origins.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />It's not a perfect representation. Rather than anatomically accurate wounds, the damage caused by players in Condemned is summarised by generic patches of blood, which appear on enemies' bodies at the approximate place where they were hit. So, instead of an open wound, a blow to the head will leave a bloody patch on the side of the face, while the facial features will remain undamaged.<br /><br />However, although injuries are glossed over, violence - as in, the act of violence - &nbsp;is unusually detailed. Killing a person in Condemned is never a case of merely pressing a button, nor does your target ever die quickly or cleanly.<br /><br />Most of your encounters are fought using a blunt weapon and your boot, meaning you have to slowly beat targets to death. There's a deliberate focus on the gradual effect of violence. Hit someone once, for example, and they'll reel back, grabbing their face and screaming. Continue hurting them and they'll try to run away from you - if you've hit them in the leg, they'll limp.<br /><br />Once you've hit them five or six times, they'll no longer be able to stand, and will fall to all fours. At this point you can either finish them off with a final blow or give them time to recover their strength and start attacking you again. If you hit them, unfortunately they transform instantly into a ragdoll model, precisely the kind of "weightlessness" that Kopas criticises. However, if you let them get up, they'll continue fighting but with diminished ability - their co-ordination and the strength of their blows will be reduced.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gbFcla7k4d8/UrIsnF6khXI/AAAAAAAAAPs/MCw91IIZKYI/s1600/1130432920.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gbFcla7k4d8/UrIsnF6khXI/AAAAAAAAAPs/MCw91IIZKYI/s320/1130432920.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Condemned shows the gradual, corrosive effect violence has on the human body. Your enemies become steadily damaged. Their ability to function is gradually weakened by your blows. And this is depicted not by a slowly lowering health bar or number of hits points, or any other cold, numerical markers: It's depicted with ragged breathing, screams of pain and faltering limbs.<br /><br />The effect of violence in videogames is usually simple: A character ceases to be a combatant - a component of gameplay - and an obstacle between the player and the objective is removed. There is no half-way point. Your enemy will continue to function healthily and to attack you until he's dead.<br /><br />In Condemned, however, we get a sense of damage, of the slow degradation of the human body that violence will cause. Like the murder victim, strangled to death, our victims die slowly and in pain. They are not simply "switched off" by a tap of a button, before vanishing from the game world: they are incrementally and viciously beaten to death.<br /><br />To put it in game reviewer's lexicon, the violence in Condemned is "visceral." It substitutes simple patterns of gameplay (alive/dead, playing/not-playing) for a more complex representation of how the human body is affected by violence. It does not simply "die." It does not cleanly "lose points", or "lose health." It bends, bruises and eventually breaks.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1cxGWtDRL3U/UrIuVx2IevI/AAAAAAAAAP4/gQqIgmTPAvk/s1600/comdemed-criminal-orgins-6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="168" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1cxGWtDRL3U/UrIuVx2IevI/AAAAAAAAAP4/gQqIgmTPAvk/s320/comdemed-criminal-orgins-6.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />And this makes the violence more unpleasant, more true to life. My own problem with game violence is that it's always associated with positive emotions. Developers will conceive ways of making it spectacular in appearance; fun to perform; exciting to experience. Rarely, if ever, will the act of killing in a videogame be miserable, unfulfilling, or punitive. It may have some small implications - killing a non-player character at one point in a game may slightly affect the story, or what items you receive later on. But in terms of gameplay, it will usually be a blithe action; it will be something you perform either happily or without worrying about it.<br /><br />That problem may be tied to what Gaynor is arguing for, about how the characters murdered by the player need to be individuals rather than nameless masses, but I think it may also relate to what Kopas is saying, about how game violence lacks "weight."<br /><br />Violence in games is easy to perform. Particularly in Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, it is simply a case of holding down the aim button and then pressing "fire." Your enemies are often weak as well, and plentiful. In terms of your own skill-set and the counter-abilities of your targets, it doesn't take a lot to kill people in videogames.<br /><br />Not so in Condemned. Your enemies are strong and resilient, and your own attacks are difficult to co-ordinate. At its launch in 2005, Condemned was a peculiar example of a melee fighting game that used a first-person viewpoint, lending the combat an unfamiliar and disorientating effect.<br /><br />Rather than dispatching enemies via a routine pressing of buttons, your encounters in Condemned involve frustration, an abortive mashing of the controller and luck. Enemies attack in unpredictable ways while your own weapons have ill-defined characteristics and rarely land where you're aiming. It's a hard game wherein fighting two or more enemies at once presents a significant challenge. Any kill that you "score" comes by way of completing a complex chain of attack and block commands, and outsmarting the erratic behaviour of opponents. Killing, or even harming, is difficult in Condemned. And rather than joyful, it's typically awkward, dissatisfying and unfair.<br /><br />Killing is hard to do. The enemies are frightening. You come to want to avoid violence, rather than associate it with pleasure. If I had to give an example of what I think Kopas means by "weighty" violence, the combat in Condemned would be it.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0hUoStki0pA/UrIussgp77I/AAAAAAAAAQA/48xK67hxoo4/s1600/condemned.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="178" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0hUoStki0pA/UrIussgp77I/AAAAAAAAAQA/48xK67hxoo4/s320/condemned.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />It certainly seems more meaningful than typical game violence, which is throwaway and disinterested in consequences. The violence in Condemned is "real" in the sense that the emotional responses it provokes are unpleasant. They may not be the unpleasant emotions solicited by real-world violence - you certainly don't fear for your life while playing Condemned - but at least it isn't joyful. At least it's closer to the real, terrible thing than most videogames get.<br /><br />Onto Gaynor's article which proposes a metric for violence in games: "<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">violence performed by the player in a videogame is only legitimate if the victim is a unique and specific individual."</span></span><br /><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Condemned is certainly not <i>that</i> clever - the people you kill are still "enemies" in the depersonalised, mechanical sense. But they're nevertheless imbued with a level of identity uncommon for first-person action games.&nbsp;</span></span><br /><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Their facial expressions change depending on their situation. If they're attacking, they'll grit their teeth and furrow their brow. If you've just hit them, or electrocuted them with your taser, their mouths will open and they'll squeeze their eyelids together. A small touch, but it makes them appear more human, more like the "individuals" which Gaynor defines as having "families, homes, jobs [and] friends."&nbsp;</span></span><br /><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And although they are lacking back stories, distinct physical characteristics or relationships to other characters in the game, your opponents in Condemned are still&nbsp;individually&nbsp;significant - they still respectively mean more&nbsp;to the player than typical game enemies.</span></span><br /><br />A single enemy in Condemned can drastically alter the player's experience of the game; his ability to progress. As I've described, they are each of them strong and difficult to kill - they each have the power to significantly harm, if not kill, the player. Unlike Call of Duty, BioShock Infinite, or other games where the player cuts down harmless groups of enemies, in Condemned, each enemy has a significant bearing on the gameplay. He is able to meaningfully impede the player's ability to continue, either by causing the player significant loss of health or sustaining the player's attacks until the player's weapon breaks, or runs out of ammunition. The enemy's bearing on the game's narrative, or the bearing his death has on the game's narrative is admittedly minimal. However, he is able to noticeably affect gameplay and his defeat always marks a significant victory. More than a single enemy in most videogames, a single Condemned enemy can influence the player, and the player's experience of the game.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Iqqj-9E_AWI/UrIvFYSGv3I/AAAAAAAAAQI/2gkbi5DBIKs/s1600/226709-condemned-criminal-origins-windows-screenshot-a-large-portion.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Iqqj-9E_AWI/UrIvFYSGv3I/AAAAAAAAAQI/2gkbi5DBIKs/s320/226709-condemned-criminal-origins-windows-screenshot-a-large-portion.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />The way Condemned treats firearms is also tied to how it wants players to respond to enemies. Not only are players limited to the ammunition remaining in the gun when they pick it up, meaning that, even if they find the very rare sub-machine gun, they'll only ever have a maximum of thirty bullets, they're also forced to physically check how many rounds are in the weapon - there is no heads-up display giving them weapon information.<br /><br />And so the game, even during gunfight sections, never degenerates into an anonymous, effortless "mowing down" of enemies. Players literally do not have the resources to behave that way. Bullets are so scarce that they must carefully decide when to use them and where to aim, something that's reinforced by the physical checking of the ammo clip.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-I25IsAg0eKk/UrIvWntfhwI/AAAAAAAAAQQ/eFPrF8Qqj9c/s1600/image_157662_thumb_wide620.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-I25IsAg0eKk/UrIvWntfhwI/AAAAAAAAAQQ/eFPrF8Qqj9c/s320/image_157662_thumb_wide620.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />You begin to count your bullets as you use them meaning that, when you kill an enemy, you're aware of how many rounds he absorbed and how many that has left you with. This precious and exact parcelling out of your resources makes each enemy feel significant. Unlike a lot of action games, where you kill a group of enemies and can then expect to be given enough ammunition to kill another group, in Condemned, you're consistently aware of your precarious supply situation: Additional bullets are rare and, in fact, health recharges are only available at fixed places in each level. Each violent encounter has a marked and potentially progress-threatening effect on your inventory. You're unable to carelessly "blast through" enemies, to think of them as surpassable obstacles - the way Condemned gives, or rather, does not give you weapons lends each enemy you have to fight a sense of menace.<br /><br />It also adds a narrative to each of your fights. You never remember how you "killed a bunch of guys." You remember how you hit one in the head with your last bullet, took a punch from another, was able to quickly grab a pipe, hit him back, and so on. Weapons and supplies are so rare in Condemned that their every usage becomes a significant moment in your game, and any violence "achieved" with them is memorable. The enemies may not have real narrative bearing, certainly not to the extent that Gaynor wishes for, but they're a significant, game-affecting drain on your supplies. They're never just some guys who you &nbsp;killed. They're guys who forced you to use your last three bullets.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SFw0ldq7QlU/UrIvjHDJ6uI/AAAAAAAAAQY/CPvpTiMJPVg/s1600/5Condemned-Criminal-Origins-Shoot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SFw0ldq7QlU/UrIvjHDJ6uI/AAAAAAAAAQY/CPvpTiMJPVg/s320/5Condemned-Criminal-Origins-Shoot.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />But, to end on, there are two things that I think damage Condemned's credibility.<br /><br />First is how the narrative slides into supernatural drama. The enemies you meet are decreasingly human, culminating in a dual-sword wielding final boss with blank white eyes and pieces of metal sticking out of his body. It's absurd, and undermining of the tangible, meaningful, human-on-human violence you experience for much of the game: It's hard to take Condemned seriously as a treatise on violence when its plot starts to include monsters and evil cults.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LPcwtjAnSNA/UrIvwRDB62I/AAAAAAAAAQg/hrEvOUkF3WY/s1600/926309_20051117_screen001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="152" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LPcwtjAnSNA/UrIvwRDB62I/AAAAAAAAAQg/hrEvOUkF3WY/s320/926309_20051117_screen001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Second is how, occasionally, the bodies of your enemies <i>will</i>&nbsp;disappear. I noticed early on how small details like blood-marks and bullet holes would appear in the game: In the fifth level, I shot an enemy in the head with a revolver, and found his blood sprayed across the floor behind him and the bullet lodged in a wall on the other side of the room. Stepping back and looking at the scene in front of me, I was reminded of the crime I investigated at the start of the game, the case of the strangled woman. In the way I looked for fingerprints and DNA, it was easy to imagine another detective discovering <i>my</i> murder and having to search the room for the bullet, and match the blood trail to the gunshot wound. This gave the game a kind of poetry - the visual similarities between the two scenes made my own kill seem as significant as the one I'd investigated.<br /><br />I liked the idea that every murder I committed would become a crime scene, that the game world wouldn't just forget what I'd done, that cops would eventually arrive to search the place. It made it seem like the enemies I killed had, like Gaynor talks about, identities. They died in similar circumstances to the people whose murders I policed. Perhaps they had &nbsp;lived similar lives as well.<br /><br />But then I left the room and came back, and the body, the bloodstain and the gunshot in the wall had all disappeared. I don't know if it was a creative misjudgement by Condemned's developers, or a technical limitation of their hardware, but I wish the bodies in the game would remain on the floor.<br /><br />Nevertheless, Condemned is a good example of how violence in videogames can be done differently. Killing in Condemned isn't fun or easy and the enemies, though hardly fully formed characters, have a significant bearing on the player's performance, experience and decision making. As Gaynor points out, there's no harm in using violence in fiction - in Greek tragedies, English literature and Hollywood films, the deaths of characters have enormous dramatic and emotional effect. Games however continue to appropriate violence for the wrong reasons: for fun, exciting spectacle and repetitive, meaningless mechanical activity. Though imperfect, Condemned is counter-intuitive to those traditions and should serve developers as the template for a better class of violent videogame.<br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2013/12/meaningful-violence-in-condemned.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-2939723647197109226Mon, 09 Dec 2013 19:03:00 +00002013-12-09T11:35:27.435-08:00On Depression Quest<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8f4UBmN0PYU/UqYO4zAcNnI/AAAAAAAAAOw/7Z6AEPSmnS4/s1600/a1441143917_10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8f4UBmN0PYU/UqYO4zAcNnI/AAAAAAAAAOw/7Z6AEPSmnS4/s320/a1441143917_10.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />It's hard to find people who understand your depression. I don't mean that in a "we're all beautiful damaged roses, and the world just won't get it" kind of way. When you're ill with depression, reaching out can be hard. You don't want to tell your friends, or your partner, because you're scared you might alienate them. And you don't want to call a doctor because your illness is telling you that you don't deserve attention - you're a middle-class, white, heterosexual Westerner, so who are you to complain? And who should care about a screw-up like you anyway?<br /><br />It's hard to even admit it to yourself. Coming to terms with the fact you have depression can make you scared that it's somehow going to be taken away from you. The thing I struggled with most about my own diagnosis was in realising that depression was an illness and that as such, it could be cured. You come to rely on and live with your depression. There's this weird Stockholm-syndrome phenomenon where you come to depend on your illness as the basis of your personality: "Once my depression is cured," I used to think "who will I be?" Allowing yourself to be treated is a threat to a lifestyle that, although deeply unhappy, is at least familiar to you.<br /><br />Talking about this illness is hard. It's why I wish that Depression Quest, developed by Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey and Isaac Schankler was available seven years ago. Since 2006, when I was diagnosed, I've read books, watched films and listened to music which all claimed to "deal" with my illness, but nothing has gotten right to the core like this game: It's eye-opening, comforting and therapeutic all at once. If you've never suffered from mental health problems, Depression Quest will help you understand what it's like. If you're currently struggling or have struggled, this game will help you - it will reassure you that you're not alone.<br /><br />I'm in an interesting place at the moment where, although I still have problems and am still in therapy, I'm able to look on my illness with a sense of clarity. Depression, and the medications and counselling used to cure it, are all familiar to me now, and so playing a game about a young man who so far has been unable to ask for help is at once enlightening and disturbing.<br /><br />It enables me to see how I got to where I am. Like the game's protagonist, my depression began mildly, with &nbsp;awkwardness at parties, never having motivation to work and feeling inadequate compared to my older sister. It then spiralled into self-harm, alcoholism and broken relationships with family and friends. "It gets a lot, lot worse before it gets even slightly better", is what I used to tell people about this illness. In Depression Quest, the same is true.<br /><br />A missed day at work becomes a full blown anxiety attack. A few stilted social functions cause you and your girlfriend to break up. Depression in the game, as in reality, destroys everything in your life except itself and as much as you want to change it, some errant thought or crippling neurosis will always prevent you from being proactive. This is why some of the choices in Depression Quest are blocked out. At the end of a week at work, some friends might call and ask you to come out drinking. You can see the option to go join them - it's listed at the bottom of the game screen along with all the others - but it's scrawled through with a red line. You just can't do it. Depression is an illness like the flu. You can't just will yourself to get better, to buck up and go out. Your mind makes it impossible. So does Depression Quest.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TE_F9UQSBAg/UqYPFIFy7vI/AAAAAAAAAO4/McTOPkUW9qA/s1600/ss2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="145" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TE_F9UQSBAg/UqYPFIFy7vI/AAAAAAAAAO4/McTOPkUW9qA/s320/ss2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />It's why it works best as a videogame. When we're gaming, we're used to freedom of choice and freedom of expression - within the confines of the game's rules, we can do virtually what we like. To have that dynamic interfered with, in the way it is in Depression Quest, represents just how powerful the illness is. It affects the very core fabric of our experiences. It destroys our ability to behave the way we want to. Choice, as in life, is everything in videogames. But depression, and the way it's depicted in Depression Quest, takes that choice away from us. The option is there to leave your bed, shower and go outside, but you just can't do it. You want to click "go out with the guys" but your character's illness won't let you. Life and gaming, as we know them, are ruined by depression.<br /><br />I used to visualise my illness this way, with "gameplay options" like meet a girlfriend or go to work crossed out for me.<br /><br />It's why Depression Quest was hard for me to play. The creators have gotten the nuances of being depressed - the sensation - down to a fine point. There was a moment (in the game) where, having lost my girlfriend, screwed up my job and refused therapy, I was alone in my flat, about to get drunk. But I fucked up opening the wine - the cork went into the bottle and spoiled it. These small defeats are soul-destroying. It feels as if the world is conspiring to destroy you, as if you, you fuck-up, can't get anything right.<br /><br />It mirrored an occasion in my own life where, having been in the pits for around six months, I was desperate for the delivery of a videogame I'd pre-ordered. I was so excited for it. It was all I had to cling onto. The night before it was set to arrive, I switched my PS3 off at the back, corrupting the hard-drive and bricking the console. I broke down. The next day I woke up still drunk, covered in self-inflicted cuts and unable to leave my bed. To some people, that might sound absurd. But the makers of Depression Quest understand. Clearly this has happened to them as well.<br /><br />Another reason I found the game difficult, emotionally I mean, was because I tried to play it honestly. There are no trite solutions when you're ill like this, no get outs. When someone asks how you are, you're not going to open up to them. If you have friends before you get depression, in all likelihood, by the time you're feeling "better", a lot of them won't know you any more. The game broke my heart because, with every honest decision I made, every helping hand I turned away or person I scared off, I could see myself, over the past seven years, doing the exact same things. It brought me face-to-face with my own, not mistakes, I guess, but miscalculations. Even that's not the right word. At the time, I couldn't help what I did.This game made me realise how much the illness fucked up my life.<br /><br />It cost me a good relationship with a woman. It prevented me from having fun at university. And although they don't know it, it alienated me from pretty much everybody in my family, partly because counselling led me to blame them for some things and partly because, like Depression Quest's central character, I came to feel like we had nothing in common. I answered Depression Quest truthfully, based on my own experiences, and with every new text prompt, my character's life got worse. I ended the game jobless, single and unable to find anyone even willing to talk to me, let alone someone who I could explain everything to. And still, I wasn't in therapy and I wasn't taking medication. This is where my own life was in 2010. Although it might upset the writers to hear this, I have to admit that Depression Quest made me guilty and angry at myself. But then, at the same time, it reminded me that it wasn't me - or a clean-thinking version of me - that made all those misjudgements. It was the bug in my head, gnawing away, driving me mad.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y7sszm9N_lI/UqYPWYP_HwI/AAAAAAAAAPA/eH0U2aJsOmw/s1600/deep-dark-place-hole-feeling-depression.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y7sszm9N_lI/UqYPWYP_HwI/AAAAAAAAAPA/eH0U2aJsOmw/s320/deep-dark-place-hole-feeling-depression.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />I've never played a game that affected me so personally. Once I'd finished Depression Quest, I sat and cried, and then double-checked to make sure my appointment with the doctor was still set for next month.<br /><br />It will help you feel understood and help you realise that it's not you that's the problem in your life, it's this wretched illness.<br /><br />But above all else, it'll help those around you to see that this is not a small matter - not something you're affecting because you want their attention. Depression Quest shows depression for what it is, a slow, encompassing destroyer of the patient's life, an impossible to explain on paper, debilitating illness. Play it and then pass it around. It has the power to do good.<br /><br /><i>Depression Quest is available to play here for free:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html">http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html</a></i><br /><i><br /></i><i>But please, contribute some money to the three developers:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.depressionquest.com/">http://www.depressionquest.com/</a></i><br /><br /><br />http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2013/12/on-depression-quest.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601562186734172021.post-3608691314886357897Fri, 06 Dec 2013 20:40:00 +00002013-12-06T12:41:43.147-08:00Men At Large, Women In Prison - on gender in Silent Hill 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fk_sv_0vRuM/UqI0oR89fqI/AAAAAAAAANo/JbQQ5OWWtBc/s1600/SH2mariaInPrison.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fk_sv_0vRuM/UqI0oR89fqI/AAAAAAAAANo/JbQQ5OWWtBc/s320/SH2mariaInPrison.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><b><br /></b><b>Introduction</b><br /><br />Ever since I finished The Last of Us I've been looking for more videogames that challenge the concept of male agency. As I wrote for the <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/07/its-game-over-archetypal-men-video-games">New Statesman</a> in July of this year, Joel's actions in The Last of Us, the ones driven by a traditional sense of masculinity, are detrimental to the game world and to other characters. &nbsp;I see the game as an affront to the idea that male protagonists in games are always right, that their decision to take action against something always leads to resolution. With the example of The Last of Us in mind, I've been mentally working back through other games of the past decade. In hindsight, I feel the reason Call of Duty 4's nuke sequence shocked me was not because of the big explosion of the bomb, or the fact my character died, but because I failed the mission. My male character took action to rescue a downed pilot and didn't end up rescuing her.<br /><br />The same can be said for Max Payne 3, where, in almost every level, Max fails his objective: He doesn't rescue Fabiana at the dock, he doesn't hand over the money at the stadium, he doesn't protect Rodrigo in his office, he doesn't catch Becker at the police station. Both of those examples, and plenty of others, are interesting to me because they show game men taking action, attempting to exercise their agency, and still failing. They represent impotence, displacement - they wrestle with the pervasive social idea that our world is a man's world. The strongest example of this I've come up with so far is Silent Hill 2, which not only undermines its male character's agency, but criticises it also, depicting, like The Last of Us, a male protagonist who makes things worse.<br /><br /><b>On gender roles</b><br /><br />You've probably read elsewhere about the game's pervasive sexual imagery. James, our player character, has murdered his terminally ill wife because she was unable to have sex with him. Arriving in Silent Hill, his guilty psyche creates Pyramid Head - a rampaging, muscled figure with a gigantic knife - and the "mannequins" - creatures resembling two sets of female legs placed end on end.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5Uwy_TxZXx0/UqI0_K1OPHI/AAAAAAAAANw/dk0q4UR5-qs/s1600/pyramid-head1302755485.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5Uwy_TxZXx0/UqI0_K1OPHI/AAAAAAAAANw/dk0q4UR5-qs/s320/pyramid-head1302755485.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PKUPOAB22q8/UqI1PWR7IVI/AAAAAAAAAN4/fy2LWD_5Ot0/s1600/2191863-Mannequin_Monster_by_EileenGalvin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PKUPOAB22q8/UqI1PWR7IVI/AAAAAAAAAN4/fy2LWD_5Ot0/s320/2191863-Mannequin_Monster_by_EileenGalvin.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Throughout the game, we see Pyramid Head rape and murder the mannequin creatures - in our initial encounter, he is sodomising two of them in the kitchen area of an apartment .<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fukZotBZXCc/UqI1bBGgtSI/AAAAAAAAAOA/KV6vhbQKohE/s1600/sh2pc2011-04-2319-33-yary6.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fukZotBZXCc/UqI1bBGgtSI/AAAAAAAAAOA/KV6vhbQKohE/s320/sh2pc2011-04-2319-33-yary6.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />We also see the mannequins behave suggestively towards the player; when we approach them as James, they hold a fixed pose until we get very close, bending their womanly legs into alluring positions.<br /><br />What we see are two different types of sexuality: Pyramid Head represents priapic male sexual agency, while the mannequins are submissive, subjugated females. Pyramid Head is more obvious. The way he lumbers around the game driving his big weapon into female bodies tells you all you need to know. The mannequins are more interesting. Their physical appearance and relationship with Pyramid Head identifies them as female, and the way they respond to James indicates sexual submissiveness.<br /><br />They present themselves to the player, waiting with legs bent until he gets near. And it's only when he gets near that they start attacking - that they become something. These female shapes require a male presence before they are allowed to move - if you stay out of range, they will remain locked in a pose, totally still, waiting to jump you. Without James, a man, they have no agency.<br /><br />They attract the player by remaining still. It's their lack of movement which makes us curious, makes us want to approach them in the first place to see what happens when we do. It smacks of stereotypical female servitude, the 1950s/Stepford Wives misconception that without a man in their lives, women serve no purpose. I find it fascinating that Pyramid Head is assaulting the two mannequins in a kitchen. He's trapped them there, in the area of the house most widely associated with domestic subservience, and now he's taking them for himself.<br /><br /><b>On locations</b><br /><br />I want to move onto James, who is struggling with his maleness.<br /><br />James is a man who will fight (and kill) for his sense masculinity but is also not secure in himself. He killed his wife because she wouldn't have sex with him, because she wouldn't (couldn't) fulfil the traditional wife role to his would-be traditional husband.<br /><br />In his relationship with Mary, James could neither contain nor exercise his ardent male sexuality. Silent Hill, the town, is littered with places that speak to this, locations that are innately and recognisably male, but also difficult to negotiate. If James' mind really is creating Silent Hill around him, its his frustrated sexuality which has fashioned many of its buildings.<br /><br />He begins the game in a men's toilet, a place which has "Men" literally written on the door. &nbsp;But James and the player controlling him, this area is difficult to navigate. We can't see the door; we might run toward rather than away from the camera. The exit itself is hidden out of our view, behind a wall. It's takes fiddling and guesswork to get out of this room.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jgK7QRiA56c/UqI1oZ5n2MI/AAAAAAAAAOI/ZOgGSWUOH3Y/s1600/silent_hill2_2b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jgK7QRiA56c/UqI1oZ5n2MI/AAAAAAAAAOI/ZOgGSWUOH3Y/s320/silent_hill2_2b.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />And this goes on. Neely's Bar is one of Silent Hill 2's most famous locales, home to that notorious line of graffiti: "There was a HOLE here. It's gone now. "<br /><br />A quick word on bars themselves. Without wanting to pigeon-hole or generalise, bars are typical gathering points for men looking to meet women. The reverse, of course, is also true, but what we most commonly associate with bars is that they're places in which men go looking for casual sex. In films, books, TV shows and videogames, male characters hangout in bars to "pick up chicks." These are places for men to ply their sex.<br /><br />Now that graffiti. It's invites several interpretations, all of which seem plausible. It might point to the town's amorphous architecture; Silent Hill is known for its frightening day/night pattern, whereby buildings and places change shape and appearance whenever the sun goes down, or comes back up again. Perhaps it's that - perhaps at night, there was a hole here, but it's daytime, and it's gone now.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W4Sls_sxEV8/UqI1yTd-7yI/AAAAAAAAAOQ/xF09ON-lmKE/s1600/7479977_orig.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W4Sls_sxEV8/UqI1yTd-7yI/AAAAAAAAAOQ/xF09ON-lmKE/s320/7479977_orig.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />It may also point to another interloper in Silent Hill. &nbsp;Through conversations between James and the other characters in Silent Hill 2, we decipher that people see the town subjectively. James sees sexually suggestive monsters, whereas Laura, a little girl, sees nothing extraordinary at all. Perhaps that's what this is. Perhaps one visitor to Silent Hill found the diary of another and expected there to be a hole here, but he saw the town differently, and there wasn't.<br /><br />I have an alternate interpretation which may seem a little overstretched, and is definitely more vulgar.<br /><br />I've always been intrigued by the emphasis placed on "hole" - it's the only part of the graffiti spelt all in upper case. We've established James' forceful male sexuality and the fact that, with Mary, he was often denied it. Now he's in a bar, a place to pick up chicks and the HOLE - the yonic symbol, the vagina - is gone. Our frustrated, impotent male protagonist is once again frustrated, once again impotent. Despite the healthy sexual relationship marriage connotes, he was unable to have sex; despite the casual sexual encounters traditionally available in bars, the HOLE is gone now.<br /><br /><b>Finally, on Eddie</b><br /><br />Eddie, whom James first meets in the apartment building near the start of the game and again, later, in a bowling alley, is a chubby, lazy man.<br /><br />He represents inactivity, castration.<br /><br />The bowling alley meeting is particularly important. When James finds Eddie, he's crouched over a table, eating pizza.<br /><br />Laura, the little girl character, symbolic of archetypal female vulnerability, has just run off into Silent Hill alone. But Eddie refuses to go after her. James is outraged. He demands Eddie help him look for Laura, but Eddie would rather sit still and eat pizza. James calls him a coward and storms off.<br /><br />Three things stand out here. Firstly, Eddie's refusal to help. We're used to game men - and men in broader media - enacting a plan to save other characters, especially female ones. The narrow gender roles that are commonly and socially accepted dictate that the men should do the work - they should find a job, buy a house and, if needs be, go to war. But Eddie won't fulfil his role. He isn't, in a myopic traditional sense, or in James's view, a real man.<br /><br />Secondly, Eddie's in a bowling alley. In films like The Big Lebowski and Pleasantville, this is where long-term married men, or divorced men, come to hang out with their similarly married or divorced friends. And bowling is not, by general social estimation, a "real sport." It's derided as a game for people who want to feel like they're playing a sport. It's half-way. It's tame.<br /><br />Thirdly, Eddie looks like James, albeit a fatter version. He has long blonde hair and light eyes. Even his facial features are similar, same mouth, same eyes:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-n38cCtRT3fk/UqI188SamqI/AAAAAAAAAOY/rjruPoDB9T4/s1600/silent_hill_2james.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-n38cCtRT3fk/UqI188SamqI/AAAAAAAAAOY/rjruPoDB9T4/s320/silent_hill_2james.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M8Ret9ZjDJs/UqI2DndBTzI/AAAAAAAAAOg/Od6CTqIFFwk/s1600/silent-hill-2-eddieeddie-dombrowski---silent-hill-italia-wiki-iwk0zkqm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M8Ret9ZjDJs/UqI2DndBTzI/AAAAAAAAAOg/Od6CTqIFFwk/s320/silent-hill-2-eddieeddie-dombrowski---silent-hill-italia-wiki-iwk0zkqm.png" width="314" /></a></div><br />In Neely's Bar, we're made to understand the impossible ultra-masculine standard James has set for himself. In the bowling alley, through Eddie, we see the kind of sub-male decrepitude he's fearful of and refuses to stoop to. Eddie is inert and scared. And he's sat in a place commonly associated with married men, men who, by dedicating themselves to a single woman have, in James's eyes, somehow given away their maleness by relinquishing their freedom to search for holes in bars.<br /><br />Eddie represents what James fears he would have become had he stayed with Mary, had he allowed himself to be "contained" by their asexual marriage: Fat, inert, wimpy, unable to play proper sport, resigned to the company of other married men. He's chubby instead of muscular, frightened instead of responsible. He's the opposite side of the spectrum to Pyramid Head. Where Pyramid Head is a warning of what might become of James if he lets his priapic desires get the best of him, Eddie is a warning against becoming complacent, of letting masculinity and male agency slip away.<br /><br />James's conflict in Silent Hill 2 is finding the middle between those two extreme poles. If you play the game well and get the best ending, James leaves Silent Hill with Laura as his new, adopted daughter. He becomes a father, a traditional male figure that doesn't carry any sexual or aggressive overtones. That, I think, is the balance he is looking for.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.wordsthatwontsell.com/2013/12/men-at-large-women-in-prison-on-gender.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Edward Smith)2